On Tuesday afternoon I am looking forward to hearing the historian Helene von Bismarck discuss her new book Fantastic Kingdom: A Stranger’s Notes on a Contrary Country with Ciaran Martin of the Blavatnik School. Not just because it will be a fascinating conversation, but because of the date and location of the event.

The discussion will take place in the Norrington Room in the basement of Blackwell’s bookshop, just along the road on Broad Street. For some years this literary cavern – which lies beneath our Library Quad – was featured in the Guinness Book of Records (edited by Trinity alumni Ross and Norris McWhirter) as the largest single room selling books in the world, housing 5km of shelves and 160,000 volumes.

Tuesday is the 60^th anniversary of the room’s official opening in 1966. Sir William Haley, the Editor of The Times, told the assembled dignitaries: “I find bookshops much more exciting, charming and profitable than libraries. In bookshops you have volumes all waiting to go out into the world. No-one knows where they will end up; they are all hopes. Every bookshop is a hope and every library a disappointment”.

Blackwell’s was founded in 1879. The original shop measured just 12 feet square and accommodated a modest selection of 700 second-hand volumes. Initially located just at 50 Broad Street, over subsequent decades the shop expanded both sideways to numbers 48-51 and upwards. By the 1960s, downwards was the only direction left.

By happy coincidence, the College had already been contemplating a redevelopment of the south-eastern part of the main site, including briefly the installation of a swimming pool – “something small and refreshing for the hottest months”. This, alas, was deemed an unnecessary luxury but discussions then began with our alumnus Julian (‘Toby’) Blackwell about a scheme of mutual advantage to the College and the bookshop, which had already been using the Library basement as a storage space since 1928.

The College built two accommodation blocks named after our alumnus and donor Hugh Cumberbatch, including a lecture theatre named for another, Colonel John Danson. These were opened by the then Secretary of State for Education, our alumnus Tony Crosland of whom I wrote in a previous blog. The main Cumberbatch building, with rooms around a concrete central spiral staircase, was designed in what has been described as a “confident and robust Brutalist form”. It was demolished in 2019 to make way for the Levine Building, to the distress of the 20^th Century Society and an architect who lives in my street in London, but not as far as I am aware to many others.

Meanwhile the College agreed that it would excavate the Library quad and create the basement space, which Blackwells would then occupy on a 21-year lease at a rent based on the capital outlay. The negotiations were led by my distinguished Presidential predecessor Sir Arthur Norrington, in whose honour the room was then named. 

The picture shows the Library and the side of Blackwell’s to the left; the backs of the White Horse, the Blackwell’s music shop and Kettell Hall on Broad Street in the centre; and then the Jackson Building on the right. The hole ended up being more than three storeys deep at the north end, requiring the underpinning of all the surrounding buildings. The foreman told Wink that the lowest levels of the building were beneath the water table, requiring the construction of a completely watertight box. There was a real danger that whole structure would try to float, so the columns beneath had to extend a further 20 metres underground. In this respect, and of course every other, a Trinity education is built on firm foundations.