1 68 The Growth of Cambridge 



The first group of Colleges chose the easier solution; Peterhouse (1284) 

 and Pembroke (1347) were built upon gravels on the southern edge of the 

 town, while the monastic buildings of the Friar Preachers (1240), later 

 utihsed by Emmanuel College, indicates the extension of building to the 

 gravels on the east of the King's Ditch depression. Many of the earher 

 buildings of the second group (Michael House, 1324, Clare Hall, 1326, 

 Gonville Hall, 1348, Trmity Hall, 1350) are clustered around sUghtly 

 higher ground indicated by the modern name of Senate House Hill, upon 

 which was built the first University buildings, the Grammar School, the 

 Law School, and the Arts School. Lower sites to the north and south were 

 soon utihsed. King's Hall (Trinity College) was built in 1337, King's 

 Chapel in 1446, Queens' College in 1448, and St Catharine's College in 

 1473. As the river Colleges have grown and extended their buildings in 

 modern times, the alluvial river marshes have been drained and raised, and 

 the Cam has been canalised, resulting in the stretch of College gardens, 

 playing fields and commons which constitute the Backs to-day. St John's 

 College, in the nineteenth century, placed new buildings west of the river 

 on a purely alluvial site; but Clare CoUege, in the twentieth century, 

 preferred to separate its new buildings from the old and placed them on 

 the rising ground of the gravel terrace west of the river. 



THE PERIOD 1500-1800 



The built-up area of the medieval town can be deduced only indirecdy 

 from archaeological and literary sources, but its extent from the later 

 sixteenth century onwards is clearly revealed in the excellent series of 

 plans and maps of varying dates which have survived.^ The earUest extant 

 of these detailed plans, those of Lyne (1574) and Hammond (1592), have 

 been taken as the basis of the map showing the growth of Cambridge 

 (Fig. 39).^ These early plans raise complex architectural questions which 

 are not important here: they provide, at any rate, a rehable picture of the 

 extent of the town in the later sixteenth century. 



In the south, a few houses flanked the two main roads into the town, 

 Trumpington Street and St Andrew's Street, separated by marshy ground 

 of a depression in the gravels occupied then by St Thomas' Leys and by 

 Swinecroft. This area was known later as the Downing site and was not 



' J. W. Clark and A. Gray, Old Plans of Cambridge, 1^74-1798 (1921). 



' Fig. 39 has been constructed from the plans of Richard Lyne, 1 574, John Hammond, 

 1592; the surveys of David Loggan, 1688, WiUiam Cunstance, 1798, George Baker, 

 1830, Richard Rowe, 1858; and the 6 in. editions of the Ordnance Survey of 1885, 

 1901, 1925. For the extension of the built-up area between 1925 and December 1937, 

 I am indebted to the Cambridge Borough Engineer and Surveyor for permission to 

 use plans in his possession. 



