Some highlights from the Forum
The Forum that 75 petitioners secured met on the morning of Wednesday 29 July in the Small Hall of the Guildhall: councillors, the College and CLAG, two hours, on the record and on camera. It was not a quiet meeting. The Council filmed all of it, so don’t take our word for anything below: watch it yourself.
A college laughs at its own masterplan
At Wednesday’s Development Control Forum we put Christ’s own Library + Study Constellation masterplan on screen. It is the College’s own 2023 plan, drawn by MICA: a lower library that matches the scale of the existing location, with study space distributed through rooms the College already holds. Students are in those rooms right now, the Y Building, the Lloyd Room, the Plumb Auditorium, because the Master put them into service himself, noting that the old library is “safe, clean, and vacant… we might as well use it”.
The Master laughed.
It matters because Historic England found “certain levels of harm… primarily as a result of the excessive bulk of the new building” and judged it “too big for its location”, while the College’s formal position is that “the need to apply public benefits to outweigh heritage harms does not therefore, in our view, apply here”. A live, less harmful alternative, the College’s own, is the one thing that position cannot survive.
Then, with the chair closing the meeting, the Master’s hand went up: “When our opponents materially misrepresent our own master plan, I give you notice, we will reply in writing. That was a total misrepresentation.” The chair: “I don’t want to get into a tit for tat here in this forum.”
Everything CLAG screened came from two documents the College published itself: the MICA masterplan, still on the architects’ own website, and Pieces, the College’s own magazine. Nothing came from anywhere else. So when the College says its masterplan was misrepresented, the fair question is: which part?
Racing the High Court
The College’s first permission is in judicial review, and both College and Council signed a consent order agreeing it should be quashed on all four grounds. Nobody defended it. Reasoned judgment follows on 20 October, twelve weeks out. Rather than wait, the College resubmitted the identical scheme in June, its stated reason being “so that the Council can re-consider the application more quickly”. It had already asked the court itself to hurry, and was refused. Mr Justice Kimblin, March 2026, in full:
“the College chose to enter contracts before the permission was legally secure. That was a risk which it chose to take. The College has been educating students since 1505. If it takes some additional time to review the legality of the consent, that is something which the College will manage.”
The court would not be rushed. Why should the Council be?
Town and gown
The Master explained that the 1970s library turned a blank back to the street because in those days it “faced into the loading bay of Argos”, so there was no need to think about the city. Fifty years on, the lane is the town’s door into academic Cambridge, 10,000 people a day walking from the bus station into the historic core, and the College is still designing for the loading bay: fourteen metres of wall against a six metre lane, which its own architect called “very important to make a beautiful wall which will be enjoyed by passers-by”.
The Master is candid about why it must go there, since keeping all six central elements around First Court is “part of our USP”. By the end of the meeting a councillor said the scheme had “really opened my eyes to the volume of land that is essentially hoarded by the colleges and not given access to the general public”. That is the question the application never answers: a college treating a public thoroughfare as the back of its own site, and a city asked to absorb the loss.
The physics of a darker lane
Fourteen metres of building over a six metre lane: the shops opposite lose their daylight, their sky and their trade, and the 10,000 people a day walking through get a canyon. The City’s brief for Bradwell’s Court warned against exactly this in 2002, and so did the College’s own architects in 2010, when Rick Mather rejected the taller options as “overpowering” Christ’s Lane and “dwarfing Christ’s lane”, putting the bulk into a basement instead, in the scheme for which the College itself obtained permission.
The College’s answer now is high windows, with the Master promising “more light pouring into the lane”. Our lead petitioner, from Cambridge’s physics faculty, replied from the floor that the windows sit fourteen metres up, so at street level it is still a wall: “as a physicist I can say that is not the geometry in which light works. Light moves perpendicularly… The pavement will not be illuminated by a 14 metre high window.” A wall, and new shadow. That is the public benefit.
The Planning Committee that will decide the application will meet at a later date. The High Court will not be rushed; it rules on 20 October. The councillors have now seen what their committee never did.