Buildings & Gardens

Phyllis Hetzel describes Newnham's gardens

Go through the ornate gates at the end of Newnham Walk, and find yourself in another world. Below a rose bed there is a sunken garden with a formal pool. Groups of students sit on the grass, some reading, some just sitting.

Enter the gardens through Pfeiffer gates	Sunken garden with new fountain

Raise your eyes to the trees studding an immense lawn. More students can be seen on garden seats or lying on the grass. No street sounds can be noticed - only the distant ping of tenis balls, or in winter the shouts of football or hockey fans. Cradling all except the playing fields is "a series of ‘Queen Anne’ buildings of delicate and intimate prettiness grouped with comfortable informality". You are in the 18 acres of the Newnham College main gardens, unsuspected by many who pass down Sidgwick Avenue.

Main lawn with 'Queen Anne' buildings

The core buildings were the work of one architect, Basil Champneys, who worked with the College for over thirty five years from 1874 to 1910. The gardens were not planned: they just grew, like the buildings. The Founders were too busy with the welfare of their clients, women wanting accommodation. Students must have fresh air, exercise, and wholesome food.

The "garden" could take care of itself, whilst an orchard was planted, pigs, and chickens were kept, and tennis courts proliferated round the steadily increasing buildings: Old Hall in 1875; Sidgwick in 1880; Clough 1888, the original Library 1897; Kennedy 1905 ; and Peile 1910.

World War II and its succeeding economic depression stopped further building for thirty years. A garden plan was adopted. It was not the one proposed by Gertrude Jekyll the famous Edwardian landscape designer. And it did not cover the whole area.

But what was adopted was her idea of herbaceous borders.

Border near Old Hall	A glimpse of College Hall	Border near Clough Hall

The development of the gardens of Newnham has been organic. Here and there traces of their past can be found. A rusty iron fence to the south of Old Hall was the boundary of the first two and a half acres leased by the Newnham Hall Company from St John’s in 1874 to build "an approved boarding house." (No theory of quadrangles or grandeur for Newnham strict practicality was the watchword.)

The odd shape of the later extension to the Old Laboratories (now a performing Arts Centre) was dictated by a boundary path which was there in 1878. The noble oak opposite Clough Hall, then a sapling, came from the Hawarden estate of Mr W E Gladstone in 1887.

The curling paths from Old Hall borders are the remains of a Victorian shrubbery.

Early summer poppies are always spectacular	Autumn leaves are also colourful

If you want to know more about the history of the buildings and garden see Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light pp 70--78; and two booklets available at the Porter’s Lodge: The Making of the Gardens, by Jane Brown; The Architecture of Basil Champneys by David Watkin. There are other buildings too but after Champneys, each designed by a different architect. On the main site is:

Fawcett (built 1938 and designed by Elizabeth Scott.)

Strachey (1966 Christophe Grillet.)

Rosalind Franklin (1995 Allies and Morrison.)

The Principal’s Lodge (1953 Louis Osman.)

Further towards Queen’s Road is the Pightle , meaning "the peaceful place". This was the first house to be built on Newnham Walk in 1864 by Professor Liveing and bought later by Newnham.

There are also five graduate houses standing in their own gardens, mostly dating from Edwardian times. They are:

Eva Smith, on Grange Road but reached through the main gardens via the Nut Walk.

Whitstead is reached across the playing fields. Carmefield (on the site of a Carmelite Convent) is, with No 2, on Wordsworth Grove, which, with the appropriate key can be reached via the Summerfield Drift. The latest addition provides handsome flats at no 2 Clare Road. There are also two maisonettes at 27 Grange Road, where once lived the second Principal Eleanor Sidgwick. Newnham certainly has a variety enough to suit all tastes.