Cambridge cricket transformed

Built on a curve around the cricket ground’s northern boundary, the nine-million-pound development was opened on Thursday 28 April by Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Mansfield, the physicist who pioneered MRI scanning.

Inside are study bedrooms for students, a 100-seat dining hall and a combination room, all with spectacular views of the pitch. Windows overlooking the pitch are shatter-proof to protect students and spectators from the effects of a boundary drive.

Both Hughes Hall and Cambridge cricket benefit from the new building. In exchange for the site, the College paid £1 million for construction of an indoor cricket school that has allowed Cambridge to become one of the six University Centres of Cricketing Excellence set up by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and now funded by the MCC.

Seen from the crease, the Hughes Hall building enhances the sense of Fenner’s as a sporting arena. The initiative has, says the University Cricket Club, “brought dramatic changes to the ground and real improvements to its facilities”.

“It is not often that one is given the opportunity of building in such a prestigious location,” said Francis Carnell of tcc architects. “The magnificent setting gives the occupants some of the best views in Cambridge.”

The building transforms a College committed not just to bringing high-flying graduate students to Cambridge, but to offering a Cambridge undergraduate education to mature students who missed out on university first time around.

The late Lord (David) Sheppard, the former Cambridge and England cricketer, said of the project: “The Hughes Hall development fits with two special interests of mine: second-chance learning and cricket. The success of the Open University has shown how many people there are with intelligence which has not been tapped for lack of opportunity. A good number would leap at the wider access to Cambridge being offered by Hughes Hall to older men and women. Then there is the development of Fenner’s as a national Centre for Cricketing Excellence, offering opportunities to promising cricketers from the city of Cambridge, the county and the eastern region, as well as University students.”

Sir Peter Mansfield, who will formally open the building, left school at 15 and studied as a mature student (at the University of London) before going on to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2003. He will be introduced by University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Alison Richard. Among the guests at the opening will be Sir Roger Bannister, the last Oxford runner to win the mile race against Cambridge when Fenners was also home to the University athletics track.

Hughes Hall’s new building cost £7 million, with nearly £2 million extra spent on acquiring the land, furnishings and landscaping. It was designed by the Cambridge architectural practice tcc architects. The contractor was Marriott Construction. It houses six flats and 73 study bedrooms, all of which have en suite showers. The rooms are arranged in a series of seven to nine bed ‘houses’. Some are single storey, some are two storey and all contain a communal kitchen and dining area, the projecting bay window of which looks over the cricket field. The eastern end of the building contains a new double-height dining hall seating 100, a new kitchen and an impressive second-floor combination room accessed directly from the hall. As a modern graduate college, Hughes Hall has no high table and its combination room is used by students as well as by fellows of the college.