County Hall is a former municipal building, now used for student accommodation, in Hobson Street,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

Cambridgeshire Cambridgeshire (abbreviated Cambs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East of England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the north-east, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and North ...

, England. It is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

History

Originally the old shire house on Market Hill had been used as the local facility for dispensing justice. However, following the implementation of the

Local Government Act 1888 Local may refer to: Geography and transportation * Local (train), a train serving local traffic demand * Local, Missouri, a community in the United States * Local government, a form of public administration, usually the lowest tier of administrat ...

, which established county councils in every county, county leaders decided that enhanced facilities were required to accommodate a meeting place for

Cambridgeshire County Council Cambridgeshire County Council is the county council of Cambridgeshire, England. The council consists of 61 councillors, representing 59 electoral divisions. The council is based at New Shire Hall at Alconbury Weald, near Huntingdon. It is a mem ...

. The site selected had previously been occupied by a Wesleyan Methodist chapel which had vacated the site in October 1913 when the congregation moved to

Wesley Methodist Church, Cambridge Wesley Methodist Church is a Methodist Church of Great Britain, Methodist church located next to Christ's Pieces in central Cambridge, England. The church was founded in 1913 "to attract and retain, and not repel, the young Methodists who come to ...

. The new building, designed by Herbert Henry Dunn in the

neoclassical style Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the Neoclassicism, Neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century in Italy and France. It became one of the most prominent architectural styles in the Western world. The pr ...

, was formally opened by Sir George Fordham, the chairman of the county council, on 5 February 1914. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with seven bays facing Hobson Street with the end bays slightly projected forwards; there were round-headed windows on the ground floor and sash windows on the first and second floors interspersed with tall

Ionic order The Ionic order is one of the three canonic orders of classical architecture, the other two being the Doric and the Corinthian. There are two lesser orders: the Tuscan (a plainer Doric), and the rich variant of Corinthian called the composite or ...

columns which supported an

entablature An entablature (; nativization of Italian , from "in" and "table") is the superstructure of moldings and bands which lies horizontally above columns, resting on their capitals. Entablatures are major elements of classical architecture, and ...

carved with the words "County Hall 1913". A memorial commemorating council staff who died in the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

was erected in the building after the war. By the late 1920s the county council had also found the Hobson Street building too small and chose to move to the shire hall at Castle Hill in 1933. The building in Hobson Street continued to be used by the county council, inter alia, as the County Planning Office and as the County Record Office, until it was acquired by

Christ's College, Cambridge Christ's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college includes the Master, the Fellows of the College, and about 450 undergraduate and 170 graduate students. The college was founded by William Byngham in 1437 as ...

in 1986. It was subsequently converted to student accommodation, based on designs by Lyster, Grillet and Harding, and renamed the Todd Building, after

Lord Todd Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Todd (2 October 1907 – 10 January 1997) was a British biochemist whose research on the structure and synthesis of nucleotides, nucleosides, and nucleotide coenzymes gained him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1 ...

, a

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...

. The conversion works included the installation of a smoked-glass drum containing a spiral staircase to provide additional access for students and alterations to the rooms on the second floor to create a lecture theatre which was named the Plumb Auditorium, after Sir John Plumb, a historian. Todd and Plumb had both become fellows of Christ's College, in Todds's case in 1944 and in Plumb's case in 1946.

References

{{reflist Grade II listed buildings in Cambridge County halls in England Government buildings completed in 1913