New Museums Site
The University's first science site in the middle of town, where several landmark discoveries were made and two museums now open to visitors.
The New Museums Site is a university science precinct between Pembroke Street and Free School Lane, tucked in among Corpus Christi College, Pembroke College and the Lion Yard shopping centre. It is the older and smaller of the University's two central science sites, the other being the Downing Site along Downing Street.
Why it matters
This was the University's first science site, and the second departmental site after the Old Schools. Its laboratories, above all the Old Cavendish Laboratory, produced a run of landmark results: the electron (1897), the neutron and the splitting of the atom (both 1932), the mechanism of nervous conduction (1930s and 1940s) and the structure of DNA (1953).
The ground was already busy long before. An Augustinian friary was founded here in 1290, and parts of its fabric survive in the Old Cavendish Laboratory. A Botanic Garden covered much of the site from 1762 until the garden moved to its present home in 1846-52, after which the University bought the land for new museums and lecture rooms. Building started in 1863, and the first block, to a cut-down version of Anthony Salvin's design, opened in 1866. The original Cavendish Laboratory followed in 1870-73, paid for privately by the University's Chancellor, William Cavendish.
The buildings
The buildings are a mixture: grand Victorian and Edwardian blocks built between 1863 and 1911, plainer brown-brick buildings of the 1930s and 1940s, and glass-and-concrete modernist work of the 1960s and 1970s. Five are listed at grade II, including the Mond Building, the Zoology Building and the Arts School.
The site houses two museums: the University Museum of Zoology and the Whipple Museum, devoted to the history of science. The rest of the site holds university departments and lecture theatres, so visitors should check each museum's own page for opening arrangements.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
