Emmanuel College

Emmanuel occupies the former Dominican friary on St Andrew's Street, and the grounds and the chapel are usually open daily and free of charge. Sir Walter Mildmay, a senior financial minister of Elizabeth I, set the college up in 1584 as a training ground for preachers. The architect for the first buildings was Ralph Symons, and the college reused much of what the friars had left behind.

What to look for

• The Hall. Mildmay's builders turned the friars' church into the dining hall and the friars' refectory into the chapel. A line from Thomas Fuller records the Queen's remark that Mildmay had erected a "puritan foundation", and his reply about having set an acorn.
• Wren's chapel. In 1677 the college commissioned a new chapel from Christopher Wren, one of three buildings in Cambridge he designed.
• The ponds and Fellows' Garden. A large fish pond, home to ducks, survives from the friary. Within the Fellows' Garden lies a pool once used by the friars for bathing; it is claimed to be the oldest open-air pool in Britain to have stayed in use without a break.
• The Queen's Building. This modern theatre, seminar and music block is built from Ketton stone and has been described as the first to use post-tensioned stone.
• John Harvard. The founder of Harvard University graduated here in 1632, and the American college was modelled on Emmanuel as it then stood.

Buying the friary

The Blackfriars site had stood empty since the Dissolution, about 45 years before the college began. The Vice-Chancellor of the day asked for it to be handed to the university, and was refused. After the property changed hands several times, the Master-elect and his brother-in-law bought it for £550 in June 1583, acting for Mildmay, and passed it to him that November. The new building opened in 1588 with a dedication festival that Mildmay attended. The college intended to train Anglican preachers, and Mildmay was a Puritan.

Books and New England

When Wren's chapel opened, the friars' old chapel was given over to the library until the books outgrew it. The library moved in 1930 into a large South Court building that had been finished in 1911 and first served as lecture rooms, and it was extended in 1974. The college's links with New England run deep: a third of the first hundred university graduates there came from Emmanuel, and Harvard's early organisation took Emmanuel's own arrangements as its pattern. Among the college's early graduates were several men who worked on the 1611 Bible translation known as the Authorised Version.

Practical notes

Enter through the Porters' Lodge on St Andrew's Street. The grounds and chapel are usually open 09:00-18:00 daily with no entry fee. The college cannot take groups of more than 15, and every building is private. There is free bike parking directly outside the entrance, and the station and bus stops are close by.