Trinity, which sprawls between the backs and the centre of town, is Cambridge’s largest, richest and arguably grandest college. The main buildings are breath-stopping medieval affairs and priceless pictures of the portly founder Henry VIII bedeck the walls. Its students jostle with tourists to get across Great Court, home of the largest covered fountain in Europe, for what that’s worth. Insanely wealthy, Trinity is the third largest landowner in the country after the Crown and the Church – there are some very pissed-off tenant villages in Suffolk. Lots of generous dipping into cavernous pockets to help less well-off students, and the College is slowly redressing its white public-schoolboy image – freaks, geeks, sloanes, jocks, hacks and downright normal folk now co-exist in relative harmony. Emphasis on the ‘relative’.
| Sex ratio (M:F): 62:38 |
Founded: 1546 |
| Full-time u’grads: 657 |
Part-time: 0 |
| Postgrads: 397 |
Mature: n/a |
| State:private school: 38:62 |
Disabled: n/a |
| Academic ranking: 3 |
International: 15% |
Airport-lounge bar with juke box, pool, quiz machine and table football; chapel (200) and Combination Room (100) for live music; prestigious choir and fortnightly sweaty bops in Wolfson Party Room (150); biggest annual ball in town (2,000 tickets); regular jazz, fortnightly Magpie & Stump comedy debating and theatre in gardens or Great Hall. JCR with widescreen TV, DVD player. Countless ever-changing societies. Widespread political disinterest, with pockets of arch-conservatism. Two libraries, one for law, imposing (Christopher) Wren Library (350,000 books); 70 24-hr computers in three computer rooms; internet access in most rooms. CofE chapel; three chaplains; charity fund-raising. Extensive sports fields 800m from College; success in rowing and rugby. Everyone lives in; rooms vary (attics with oak beams, grand rooms with high ceilings, modern with en suite facilities); mixed sex couples can choose to share; eat in dark and moody Great Hall; popular and riotous formal hall every night; varied kitchen facilities; booze-dispensing buttery, vast wine cellar. CCTV, swipe cards; nurse; Women’s and Access Officers, LGBT rep; wheelchair access dreadful, some adapted rooms. Generous financial support, usually in the form of bizarre prizes; choral and organ scholarships.
FAMOUS ALUMNI
Francis Bacon (artist); Lord Byron (poet); Prince Charles; Vanessa Feltz (talk show diet cheat) Earl Grey (one of six ex-PMs who went to Trinity); Lord Hurd (Con, former Foreign Secretary); A A Milne (Winnie the Pooh); Lord Macaulay (historian); Vladimir Nabokov (writer, Lolita); Jawaharlal Nehru (first prime minister of India); Isaac Newton (scientist); Enoch Powell ('rivers of blood' MP); Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophers); Alfred, Lord Tennyson (poet); Lord Whitelaw (ex-Tory minister).