Stories from the Archives

How do you move with the times at a Cambridge College, responding to the changing needs of a modern-day community while respecting the fabric and history of a 500-year-old institution? That was the challenge facing St John’s as the College embarked on a landmark project to update the dining spaces to ensure they were fit for the 21st century and beyond.

Feasting, it’s true, has historically been woven into the fabric of College life: a means of bringing together scholars for the discourse and sociability that encapsulate the collegiate ideal. But, day to day, that same bonding over shared meals is a much lower key affair: more likely today to feature baked potatoes or a vegetarian curry than turbot, oysters and pheasant.

Meet Professor Erwin Reisner, whose innovative Cambridge research team harnesses sunlight to turn rubbish and CO2 into sustainable fuels. He explains why he chose this challenge, and reveals the balance between working for the greater good and day-to-day problem solving in the lab.

A protected orchid that looks like a naked man has caught gardeners by surprise in the grounds of St John’s College, Cambridge. The Orchis Simia is known as the ‘Naked Hanging Man Orchid’, and more commonly as the ‘Monkey Orchid’, because of its resemblance to a naked male or a monkey.

D-Day – a major turning point in the Second World War - was organised by army officers in the Combination Room at St John’s College. On 6 June 1944, 156,000 British, US and Canadian troops landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of the Normandy region of France. Codenamed Operation Neptune and now known as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history.

The history of treason is full of paranoid kings and queens, truculent medieval barons, assassins and plotters. It also tells perhaps more edifying tales of revolutionaries, priests and statesmen prepared to die for their faith and beliefs.

A painting of Lady Margaret Beaufort, matriarch of the Tudor dynasty and grandmother of King Henry VIII, has gone on display at the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery after a painstaking restoration project. The ‘extremely rare’ 16th-century painting, owned by St John’s College, is the earliest large-scale portrait of an English woman and one of the earliest large-scale portraits of a single individual in the UK.

Eight path-beating Johnian women, whose diverse careers have spanned the heights of government, the hidden worlds of human cells and the wild expanses of the Southern Ocean, are celebrated in a new exhibition of photographic portraits marking 40 years of women at the College. The portraits, which capture the eight subjects in their daily surroundings, provide a contemporary counterpoint to the historic artworks displayed in Hall at St John’s, allowing the spirit and achievements of women and younger alumnae to be recognised.

Energy is one of the key issues of our age. How we eat, how we keep ourselves and our buildings warm, how we counter the destructive effects of carbon emissions on our climate as we transition to cleaner energy. St John’s, like the wider University, is grappling with these unprecedented questions, in our world-leading research but also in our day-to-day processes as a place of study and a residential community.