Lucy Cavendish College
A 1960s college founded by women academics, set among converted 19th-century villas on the western edge of the centre.
Lucy Cavendish was founded in 1965 by women academics who felt Cambridge offered too few places and posts to women. At the time only Girton and Newnham were women's colleges, and the founders had begun as an informal dining group. The college is named for Lucy Cavendish (1841-1925), a campaigner for women's education, whose great-niece, Margaret Braithwaite, was among those who set up the college. It admitted only women for its first fifty-odd years and has taken men and women since 2021.
The site
After a few years in rooms on Silver Street and Northampton Street, it settled in 1970 at its current site, where Lady Margaret Road meets Madingley Road, with some of the land coming from St John's College. The grounds are built around three converted 19th-century villas, with a newer Passivhaus-standard accommodation block alongside. Next door stood Balliol Croft, where the economist Alfred Marshall had lived with Mary Paley Marshall; the college bought it in 1991, used it for student rooms, and since 2001 has made it the President's Lodge. Warburton Hall and the library date from the 1990s.
Name, charter and emblem
Early on it was a "Collegiate Society" carrying Lucy Cavendish's name. Permission to call itself a college came in 1986, and a Royal Charter in 1997 gave it full collegiate standing within Cambridge. Its first president was a zoologist who had studied how cephalopods digest their food, and that is why a nautilus shell appears in the college coat of arms.
Students and sustainability
The college has long aimed to widen who studies in Cambridge. In the 2022 admissions cycle it reported that over 90 per cent of its new undergraduates came from state schools. The newer accommodation block meets the Passivhaus standard, the college says all its electricity comes from renewable sources, and in 2022 it received the Platinum Award in the Green Impact scheme.
Practical notes
The college lies north-west of the centre, near St John's College and Westminster College. Public opening hours are not published, so treat it as a working college and contact it before visiting. The college also hosts a fiction prize for unpublished women novelists.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
