A trip down Mill Lane… 

By Stephen Howe

A major Cambridge landmark disappeared in 2022, when the Mill Lane Lecture Block (a classic exercise in pre-War neo-Georgian architecture) was pulled down to make way for a new residential development for Pembroke College. 

Older readers will recall the ‘Mill Lane’ days, when the present-day Faculty of Classics was divided (like Caesar’s Gaul) into three parts, an arrangement which continued until the present Faculty building was completed in 1982. The Cast Gallery, together with the Library of Classical Archaeology and a semi-circular lecture theatre, were housed in the ‘Old Ark’ in Little St. Mary’s Lane (now Peterhouse Library). The Faculty Secretary and her typewriter held court (on a part-time basis) in an office at 20 Silver Street. And the Classics Library (which in those days mainly stocked books on literature, history and philosophy) was housed on the top floor of the Mill Lane Lecture Block, together with (from 1969) a common room decorated in an outré shade of orange. 

The expiry of the lease of the Old Ark site necessitated the construction of the new building in Sidgwick Avenue. This was designed to house both the Cast Gallery in a top-lit space on the upper floor, and the now-combined library collections on the ground floor. The vacated Mill Lane Library would later house the collections of Land Economy (which have since moved in their turn to the Seeley Historical Library, located elsewhere on the Sidgwick Site). 

View of the former Classics Library at Mill Lane in its later incarnation as the Land Economy Library. We are facing away from the library entrance, looking towards the high window which overlooked Little St. Mary's Lane

But the physical removal of a major landmark cannot expunge the vivid memories that many people (senior members of the Faculty and alumni) have of their ‘Mill Lane Days’. Moreover, the present Classics Library has inherited the contents of the old Library Office filing cabinet, a treasure-trove of typewritten documents (with occasional additions in fountain pen). 

We begin our survey with the First Report of the General Board’s Committee on Libraries which was published in the Cambridge University Reporter on 28th March 1969. Its lapidary entry for the 

Classics Library informs us that it was established in 1933, simultaneously with the opening of the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms. The Librarian in 1969 was an academic member of the Faculty, Mrs Dorothy Crawford (now Dorothy Thompson, who informs us that at this date only D.Litts were vouchsafed the title ‘Dr’, mere PhDs being invariably styled Mr, Mrs or Miss). The Library Assistant in charge was Miss June Ethridge, who would remain in post until the 1980s. There was also one unnamed assistant… Borrowing rules were strict: undergraduates could only borrow three books overnight in Term (in Vacation four books for the period). Senior members and B.A.s could borrow five volumes for seven days. We are thus emphatically in the pre-digital era, and we deduce that Loebs were the volumes in most demand, for they were only issued for overnight use, regardless of reader status. All loans were managed manually (and therefore labour-intensively), as they were in all libraries until the tides of library automation began to flow in the 1970s. And the catalogue? A card-catalogue, of course, with wooden pull-out drawers. 

The Library of Classical Archaeology (inside the Old Ark) in its heyday

Libraries often preserve the past in more ways than one. Opening hours in Full Term were 9am until 7pm Monday to Saturday. This weekday arrangement would continue in the new Faculty Library for 38 years, until the pandemic intervened in 2020. (We now close at 6pm on weekdays, which we find rather less onerous on those rare occasions when a postgraduate library invigilator is unavailable, and overtime is unavoidable. Noblesse oblige! And Saturday opening hours have dwindled over the decades to 2pm-5pm). 

Meanwhile, readers may expect a further instalment from the Mill Lane filing cabinet in the next issue of the Newsletter… 

Information about the Mill Lane redevelopment can be found here: https://www.pem.cam.ac.uk/alumni-development/support-pembroke/time-and-…