County Hall
A Grade II listed neoclassical council building of 1913-14 on Hobson Street, now student accommodation for Christ's College.
County Hall on Hobson Street is a Grade II listed neoclassical building opened on 5 February 1914 for Cambridgeshire County Council. It has since become student accommodation, so this page is about the building's history and its street front.
Why it was built
Cambridge's courts had met in a shire house on Market Hill, the old local base for justice. Once the Local Government Act 1888 created county councils, the county's leaders judged that a better home was needed for Cambridgeshire County Council to meet in. They chose a plot on Hobson Street where a Wesleyan Methodist chapel had stood until October 1913, when that congregation relocated to Wesley Methodist Church.
The building
Herbert Henry Dunn designed the new hall in a neoclassical style. The front is symmetrical, seven bays wide along Hobson Street, and the two end bays step forward a little. Windows on the ground floor are round-headed, those above are sashes, and tall Ionic columns between them hold up an entablature lettered "County Hall 1913". After the First World War the building gained a memorial to council staff who died in that war.
After the council
In 1933 the council moved its main business to the shire hall on Castle Hill, yet Hobson Street stayed in county use for the county's planning and record offices, among other things. Christ's College acquired it in 1986. Conversion into student rooms, to designs by Lyster, Grillet and Harding, added a smoked-glass drum with a spiral staircase and a second-floor lecture theatre, the Plumb Auditorium. The college gave the building a new name, honouring Lord Todd, a Nobel laureate who had become a Christ's fellow in 1944: the Todd Building.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
