New Museums Site

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The New Museums Site

Old Cavendish Laboratory entrance

The New Museums Site is a major site of the University of Cambridge, located in the centre of the city, on Pembroke Street and Free School Lane, sandwiched between Corpus Christi College, Pembroke College and the Lion Yard. The smaller and older of two university city-centre science sites (the other is the Downing Site), the New Museums Site houses many of the university's science departments, lecture halls and examination rooms, as well as two museums.

Formerly the site of the university Botanic Garden (now off Hills Road), the New Museums Site is an eclectic mixture of grand Victorian buildings erected between 1870 and 1909, such as the Old Cavendish Laboratory; yellow-brick buildings from the 1930-40s, largely utilitarian with the exception of the Mond Building; and modernist glass-and-concrete buildings dating from the 1970s, such as the Materials Science & Metallurgy tower.

Several important scientific developments of the 19th & 20th centuries were made here, mainly at the Old Cavendish Laboratory, including the discoveries of the electron by J.J. Thomson (1897) & the neutron by Chadwick (1932), 'splitting the atom' by Cockcroft & Walton (1932), mechanism of nervous conduction by Hodgkin & Huxley (1930s-40s), and DNA structure by Watson & Crick (1953).