Leckhampton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
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Leckhampton is the residential site for graduate students of Corpus Christi College of the University of Cambridge. It consists of the late-nineteenth-century Leckhampton House, the George Thomson Building, dating from the 1960s, and several other nearby houses. The buildings are set off Grange Road amidst large, attractive gardens adjacent to Corpus's sports grounds, about fifteen minutes' walk from the main college site in Trumpington Street. Leckhampton has its own library, dining hall and bar; it forms the social as well as residential centre of Corpus graduate life. It also houses a number of fellows, both visiting and of Corpus.
Removed from the city centre, yet close to many academic buildings including the University Library and the Sidgwick Site, Leckhampton is in an ideal location for graduate students, and was a pioneering development among Cambridge colleges when it was established as a graduate centre. Prior to this, graduate students at Cambridge, long a tiny minority of the student body, had for the most part lived among undergraduates in colleges' main sites. Corpus's response to the rapidly growing number of graduate students in the 1960s was to establish at Leckhampton a largely self-contained graduate community, a move which has since been emulated to some extent by many other colleges. Although at least one of these developments went much further than Leckhampton – Clare College's graduate site became the independent college of Clare Hall in 1984 – Corpus is still popularly recognised as having the best facilities for graduates in Cambridge. Since the separation of Clare and Clare Hall, it is once again unique among the colleges that admit both undergraduates and postgraduates in having a dedicated graduate site. Indeed, it is not unknown for Cambridge undergraduates from other colleges to switch to Corpus for their postgraduate studies to take advantage of Leckhampton.
Although it was not used to house students and fellows until the 1960s, Leckhampton House has been owned by Corpus since it was built in 1881. Legend has it that the enthusiastic psychic experiments pursued by some early inhabitants has made it the least haunted house in Britain, a pleasing contrast (for those troubled by such things) to the selection of ghost stories that have become attached to 'Old House', the main Corpus buildings.
In contrast to Leckhampton House's suburban late-Victorianism, the George Thomson Building (named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Paget Thomson, sometime master of the college) is an example of postwar modernism. Like other buildings of its kind on University campuses, some have criticised it as unimaginative, boxy and out of place. Others, however, have hailed it as an outstanding example for the period. Certainly, from some angles, the building seems to float above the lawns of the campus, and it is particularly striking at night. The other buildings of Leckhampton are late-nineteenth-century houses in the adjacent streets which have been bought by the college over the years and linked to the main buildings and gardens.
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