Related information about King's College, University of Cambridge

The ancient Cambridge High Street originally had four names: St. John's Street, Trinity Street, King's Avenue, and Trumpington Street. It stretches from the Tudor-era gatehouse in the north to the Fitzwilliam Museum in the south, with King's College's majestic chapel at its centre. The heart of the street is the King's Mile, a true royal boulevard, at least outside the tourist season. Crowding is unavoidable in normal times. This is the picturesque center of the town. The Assembly Hall, St. Mary's Church, King's College Chapel - in this architectural complex, classical and medieval styles are mixed. However, without the big tree in King's College Chapel, no matter how glorious the building is, it would be deserted.

Those brick and truss houses were built in the 18th and 19th centuries. Shops, cafes, housing - there isn't a single famous house on the King's Road, but they all add up to a vivid backdrop for the college opposite. Newspapers, teddy bears and robes can be bought on the King's Road, ties of all colors can be bought at Red and Amis, and the best of today's handicrafts can be found in the Primavera Gallery. People used to meet each other at least once a day on the King's Road, which was the news exchange between the faculties and where university policy was formulated. "Please remember this," Francis Cornford wrote in his "Microbiology of University Education" in 1908, "the people who do things are the people who walk up and down the King's Road from 2 to 4 o'clock, every day of their lives. .”King’s College Chapel would be in better proportions if we knocked off a few of the small towers at either end!

—John Ruskin, 1849

A stone wall stretches along the King's Road, divided into sections by beautiful spiers, as if behind the wall was Kublai Khan's It's like a palace. Through the lattice windows, you can see the green grass in the inner courtyard. Even the Victorian mailbox outside the gatehouse has a small dome. "No Bicycles" is written on the wall leaning against the bicycle. Swallows build their nests in the arches despite the daily influx of tourists. This is the classical portico of King's College. Visitors will of course enter and exit through the north door of the chapel. Even the back door is grand here. John Betjeman said that of all the Cambridge colleges the most similar to Oxford was King's College, and not without reason - it was the most flattering remark an Oxfordian could make.

The full name of the college is "King's College of Mary Blessed and Saint Nicholas". It was founded by Henry VI in 1441, a few months later than Eton College. The king, who had just turned 19 at the time, founded these two colleges and was following the example of William Wickham. Seventy years before that, Wickham linked New College in Oxford with a senior preparatory school in Winchester.

Until 1861, King's College only admitted students from Eton College. The elite also enjoyed the privilege of neither having to take the usual university examinations nor being subject to the authority of official agents. The King granted those who attended King's College a special status that lasted until the mid-19th century. Rather than making them more likeable, this enhances their pseudo-gentlemanly charm.

Today King's College always emphasizes its liberal tradition of not believing in the Church of England. It began accepting girls in 1973 and was one of the first colleges in Cambridge to accept girls. Today, it is this former Eton enclave that has the highest proportion of students from public schools (around 80%).

King’s College also accepted minority students earlier and more than other colleges. Teachers and students are equally important, this is the custom at King's College. This free and friendly spirit was also characteristic of the Apostle and Bloomsbury Clubs, and no one described it more thoroughly than the novelist Forster, a Fellow of King's College, who said he would rather sell his Nor will the state betray his friends. Saying this when the academy was first built would have killed him.

The charter stipulates that King's College should recruit 70 academicians and students, 10 priests, 6 ordinary believers, 16 choir boys and a dean. The dean is not called Master, but Provost. At the time it was the largest college in Cambridge, and building such a large college required land. The entire town, including its parish church, was demolished in one fell swoop, and planned new buildings were not completed until centuries later. At first, only the old courtyard to the north of the chapel was built, which later became the school hall. With the king's fall in the Wars of the Roses, there was no funds left to complete his college.

In 1515, the chapel was miraculously completed, and it took more than 200 years before King's College made another ambitious plan - and again only part of it was realized: the Gibbs Building opposite the gate. James Gibbs, the architect of the Chamber, designed this long, empty annex using light-colored Portland stone, in line with the rational spirit of classical architectural art (1724~1732). Above the ground floor of the stone wall is the piano room, with straight, steady eaves and railings on the top floor - in sharp contrast to the unusually flexible and towering Gothic style of the adjacent chapel. Only the triumphal arch-like passage, triangular lintels and semicircular windows bring some tension to the symmetrical facade, whose simplicity is also due to the limited budget.

On October 25, 1946, in this building, the two great men had their first and only dispute. “Is there any philosophical trouble?” asked Karl Popper, the invited speaker of the Ethics Club, while Ludwig Wittgenstein grabbed a firehook.

Did he really do this? This legendary event led to the longest and most bizarre footnote in the history of philosophy. Today, the room is the studio of two Fellows of King's College - the economic historian Emma Rothschild and the Astronomer Royal, Baron Martin Rees.

The compound designed by Gibbs was supposed to have two separate annex buildings, not just one. Another century passed before the entrance courtyard of King's College was built into what it is today. William Wilkins, the greatest college architect at the time, built the south building and the dining hall from 1824 to 1828. There are two spiers on the roof. Facing the street on the east side, there is the gatehouse and the chanting platform. This wall has Gothic spiers built above the parapet, as if they climbed down from the chapel roof, and large vertical windows built into the wall, light, transparent, and low enough not to spoil the view of the college chapel. . In the center is the Gatehouse, a neo-Gothic masterpiece with dome and spire. Although the vertical line chapel and the gate were built more than 300 years apart, they appear consistent and harmonious as a whole, which is a great success for the architect. Who will miss the cloister Wilkins wanted to build on the inside?

Until his death in 1970, Foster lived in the entrance courtyard of King's College for the last 20 years of his life. He was a saint of the academy, teachers and students came to visit him, and he was no longer the "shy little mouse" Virginia Woolf wrote about. His novel "Maurice" describes a gay love story in Cambridge. In James Ivory's film adaptation, academicians still queue up to the high table in the cafeteria. As I sat there, the cafeteria under the tall neo-Gothic joisted flat roof was bustling with activity, no one was wearing robes anymore, and the high tables had been removed. Hal Dixon, the retired academician who accompanied me, said: "We pride ourselves on being egalitarians." Old acquaintances looked down at us from the dado wall of the canteen. That was Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Baron and his son Horace.

Among the colleagues Dr. Hal Dixon often met here in the past were Nobel Prize winner and biochemist Friedrich Sanger, historian Noel Annan , the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm or Tony Blair’s teacher, the sociologist Anthony Giddens. Here you can also see a young academician in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt - French teacher Andy Martin. He describes surfing just like Roland Barthes describes daily life. The corridors and meeting rooms are lined with portraits of King's notables, many from the Bloomsbury Circle (there are also small Indian sculptures in the women's toilets). The library of King's College was also designed by Wilkins. It has a collection of nearly 130,000 books, specializing in medieval and Oriental manuscripts, as well as rare books collected by an economist. Keynes had no heirs. When he died in 1946, he left first editions of the works of Copernicus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Voltaire, and Milton to his academy, a museum of European intellectual history. Rare library; Keynes collected about 50 editions of Kant's works published in the 18th century. For him, reading was as natural as breathing.

Keynes collected books since attending King's College. The walls of his residence in Webber Court behind the library were painted with nude male dancers and grape pickers, painted by his friends Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. The Hostel Garden is a residential area next to the Academician's Garden (1949). The flowers and still life floor tiles on the ground are also made by them.

Thousands of letters and photographs from Bloomsbury artists - King's graduates from Roger Fry to Alan Turing - are housed in the College Library's Modern Archives Centre. manuscripts, to almost all the posthumous manuscripts of Forster and Rupert Brooke. It is not ruled out that former history student Salman Rushdie will one day donate a printout of his novel to the archive, and now its reading room even has a painted door from Keynes’s residence next to Gordon Square in London. . The University Green is King's College's Cam River Green, where cattle graze. At the beginning of Forster's novel The Longest Journey, several King's College students make philosophical remarks: "The cow lives... Whether I am in Cambridge, Iceland or dead, the cow will live." We. Entering the back garden from Wilkins' Cambridge (1819). A slightly curved linden grove leads us through the meadows along its graceful lines. There are anemones, hyacinths, blue stars, daffodils, and checkerboard flowers blooming everywhere. In the grassland by the river, the first trace of new green is flickering. But what is unique is that even without the colorful spring colors, the view of King's College from the back garden has remained unchanged since the 18th century: Gibbs House, the Chapel, the old courtyard of Clare College, where they sit, maintaining their green and Noble distance. This is the road that the choirboys of King's College walk every day from the school across the road to attend evening prayers in the college chapel.

On July 25, 1446, on Jacob's Day, King Henry VI held the foundation stone laying ceremony for the college chapel. People at that time must have thought it was more magnificent than we do today. Only the cathedral and the palace chapel have similar glory. The chapel was a mass chapel for the founder of the college, but it was first and foremost a monument to the Church against the Wycliffes and other heretics of the time.

After 70 years, the King's College Chapel was finally completed. It is a symbol of British post-Gothic style. Its influence extends far beyond Cambridge. It is the last large church building of the royal patronage before the Reformation.

The janitors at King's College called their chapel "The Shed". Coleridge praised its "beauty beyond sensory intuition", William Turner painted it with a brush, and William Wordsworth dedicated three poems to it. Only John Ruskin, a leading architect from Oxford, complained that Cambridge's baby looked like an upside-down table with four legs pointing upward. For wall climbers in the 1930s, the greatest challenge was the vertical sheer face of the northeast tower of King's Chapel. Whoever can secure an umbrella or a bicycle to the top of a tall tower will feel a similar sense of triumph as the stonemason of old did standing on rickety scaffolding. There were sometimes as many as 200 workers building King's Chapel, which was quite a lot for a city with only about 5,000 residents at the time. What a building it is: begun in 1446 under a Lancastrian king, interrupted in 1461 by the Wars of the Roses, resumed in 1477 by the victors of the House of York, suspended again in 1485, and finally by the Tudors Excellently done. As usual, the east wall was built first, using gray-white magnesium limestone from Yorkshire. The western rear part of the chapel is made of North Hampton's darker, creamy Wilton stone. Not only from the replacement of stones, but also from the style, it can be seen that the building has been interrupted. The west part of the buttresses is decorated with many Tudor roses, hanging doors, fragrant root tails and coat of arms animals, which is different from the earlier east part. But despite this difference, despite the long construction period, and despite the fact that at least four architects led the project, the overall effect could not be more uniform.

In a magical belief in static, the chapel eliminated the divisions of load-bearing walls and windows, and John Betjeman called it a crystal palace of "stone and glass." The truss structure is like a spider web that spreads delicately over the windows, walls and roof, forming a long, high room. Walls are weightless, they seem to carry nothing but their own lightness. There was plenty of light in the room and it was bright. The ribs of the half-columns on each side jutted out and branched into a vault high above us, fanning out almost effortlessly. This fan-shaped vault has a span of 12 meters, a length of 88 meters, and a height of 24 meters. It is completed in one go without interruption. This great engineering achievement combines clear structure with tasteful decoration. To build such a magnificent dome, which was a bold design at the time, it was necessary to embed a crown stone in the rhombus of the vertical ribs at the fold of the fan. The crown stone itself already weighed one ton, and roses and hangings were carved out of a huge stone. Door, as alternating Tudor coat of arms. The entire vault weighs 1,875 tons, and the entire weight is directed outwards and shared by four corner towers and 22 buttresses. A row of side halls that run through the building conceal the depth of the thick buttresses. The spiers of the buttresses stand like spear points on the ridge of the roof, poking into the sky.

Thanks to the help of a fellow of King's College, I was able to gain access to the fan vault of the chapel. A spiral staircase in the northwest tower connects to a narrow passage along the side wall, where huge oak beams rest. Immediately under the beam is a dark room, whose undulating floor is the back of the fan-shaped vault. Between the oak ribs and the stone roof, I felt like Jonah in the belly of a whale. This domed wonder has a name: John Vastel. There is evidence that he lived in the builder's shed at King's Chapel from 1485. Among the works attributed to him are the fan-shaped vaults in the central tower of Canterbury Cathedral and the vintage chancel of Petersburg Cathedral. His representative works are in Cambridge. Reginald Ely, Henry VI's architect, originally planned a branch vault. John Vastel completed the chapel with this huge fan vault from 1512 to 1515, which is also the largest fan vault in England. top. Vastel and his stonemason Thomas Stockton also built most of the vaults in the side chapels, the portals and turrets with many statues, and the exquisitely carved emblems—nearly 400 stone emblems in total: Roses, crowns, porticoes and flowers, Lady Beaufort's greyhound, Tudor Welsh dragons. Henry VI would never have approved of such decoration. His whole chapel was supposed to be as simple as the east one. But Henry VIII made the front room a treasure trove of his own coat of arms: a magnificent Anglican vestry and hall of honor for the Tudor family, which, as a new dynasty whose rule was not yet stable, had to show off its coat of arms even more. The imposition of coats of arms on architecture was such a quintessentially Spanish trait that art historian David Watkin suggested it "may have been the result of the 1509 marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon."

The ornate black oak chancel, a gift from the king, separates the narthex from the chancel. This provides just the right amount of separation from the extra-long room, enhancing its appeal. The entrance to the lectern resembles a Roman triumphal arch, above which is a pipe organ (late 17th century), with two angels standing on its transverse feet, playing shining trombones - what an ingenious arrangement! The contrast in style is also extraordinary: Gothic architecture is surrounded by Renaissance wood carvings, altar cabinets and altar chairs. Finely carved columns, pilasters, floor tiles, round arches, and classical shapes separate numerous statues and patterns that are almost artificial. Among the early Renaissance styles, its quality is unique in England.

Are those woodcarvers from Italy, France or the Netherlands? We don't know their names. But they left the royal initials HR and RA. Henry VIII married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in 1533 and had her beheaded in 1536 - a useful basis for identifying the date of the altar cabinet.

Unlike the wood carving, the contract for the chapel window has survived, with the artist's name written on it. Bernard Flower, the royal glassmaker, painted the glass paintings of King's Chapel from 1515 to 1547. This is the most complete set of church windows from the time of Henry VIII. During World War II they were dismantled piece by piece and stored, and then it took five years to reinstall them. From a stylistic point of view, these glass paintings reflect the transition from Gothic to Renaissance; from an iconological point of view, they also fully follow the medieval tradition. The upper part of the 24 portholes tells stories from the Old Testament, and the lower part depicts plots from the New Testament. The Domesday Judgment picture in the west window echoes the large east window depicting the Passion of Christ and the crucifixion of Jesus. It's all very moving and of art historical value. There was a painting in a side hall that really touched me: Craigie Acheson's "The Passion of the Christ" created in 1994, which is a code of the most primitive eternal loneliness, drowned in the passion of color. A window washer carved his personal message on the chapel narthex: "John Blackmore washed these windows in 1747." Later it was: "They need cleaning again."

It was precisely the huge Rubens work that was so popular with the audience in the King's College Chapel that it caused an outcry among experts. The painting was painted for a nunnery in Flanders in 1634 and was later acquired by the Earl of Westminster. The high price of 3 million marks sold at auction in 1959 broke the record at the time, and its new owner donated it to College. These "worship" methods are actually very good. But because the painting was too big to fit in the east window, the academicians had the historic main altar demolished and the dado removed. From this point on, just above the Holy Family, this masterpiece of Baroque polychrome and Tudor glass work a daring battle. But we must be fair: what happened at the other end of the chapel was a greater aesthetic disaster - the souvenir shop in the vestibule.

Undoubtedly, the King's College Chapel needs money, and the daily expenses alone amount to more than 1,500 euros. Acid rain and car exhaust are increasingly damaging walls. With continued weathering, maintenance issues and repair costs grow. A few years ago, when it was free to visit, people dropped their donations into an iron-clad oak box next to the gate (now on display in the chapel exhibition room in the side chapel). It is said that Henry VII used this box to donate money to Cambridge in order to build the college chapel. People there have long been taking advantage of a unique source of income - the golden voices of choirboys. The choir at King's College is older than the chapel. In 1441, the year when the college was founded, Henry VI stipulated that mass should be sung every day in the chapel of King's College by 6 ordinary believers and 16 "elegant and modest" boys. They've been doing it for over 550 years. 16 boys, wearing Eton uniforms, top hats and tailcoats, came to attend evening prayers at 5:30. King's College School, 50 Grange Road, is a co-educational preparatory school for children aged 4 to 13. There, in addition to singing, they learn the traditional morals of self-discipline, loyalty and perseverance.

There have long been women serving as priests in the Anglican Church. But what if there were girls in the choir at King's College? Hard to imagine. No soprano can achieve this vibrating boyish voice, this inimitable quality that is somewhere between an angel and a eunuch. What rose into the fan-vaults of King's College was a crystal-clear highest voice, a sonic magician who worked to the extreme just before the sonic transformation. Looking at the angelic boy sitting in the choir chair, illuminated by the light of the smokeless Swedish candle, it all fascinates us. Darwin said in his memoirs that when he was at university he often attended evening prayers at King's Chapel and was so moved by the sounds of nature in the room that he "sometimes invited the choirboys to sing in my room".

Since the Middle Ages, British cathedrals and colleges have trained singing boys, and their voices have been incorporated into polyphonic works by church composers, especially in the Tudor era, which was a British A unique vocal culture that is still vibrant today. The King's College Sound took this perfect music that was formed at that time to an otherworldly level. There is always a place in the chapel for evening prayers every term, but there is always one time a year when it is very crowded, and people with sleeping bags can be seen lining up outside the college gates the night before. King's College's Christmas Eve concert has an audience of 190 million, not counting the 1,500 lucky people in the chapel. Thanks to the BBC, since 1928, when a crisp solo voice sings those famous lines, the world has been able to watch them live. For the British, "King's College Hymn" is as essential to Christmas celebrations as the turkey is to America.

Henry VI's Choir Boys are a national export, marketed by agents like other boy bands in the rock industry. They go out for concerts on the weekends, tour abroad in the summer, and release three new CDs every year.

In a secularized society, this type of church music is becoming more and more popular. Important musicians emerged from the academy and its choir: Orlando Gibbons, who sang here at the age of 13; conductor John Eliot Gardner; current manager of the Aldeburgh Festival the classicist Thomas Eads and tenors like David Cordier and Laurence Zazo.