Essay by Elsie McDowell
At first glance the Gables, Whinside, and Fossedene - the three St Johns-owned houses due to be knocked down thus year - have little to do with the mythic. However, as someone who spent the last year living in the Gables, and will be part of the last group of people ever to do so, I think the memories that these places have accumulated over the course of their history have the evasive, unexplained quality that makes something mythical.
As I walk to the kitchen to make myself breakfast in the morning, I know that I am tracing the steps of someone over a century ago making theirs. Over the course of this article, I am going to chart the history of The Gables, Whinside, and Fossedene, and make an attempt to capture some of that mythic memory that will be lost when these houses are knocked down.
On the 29th of December, 1897, Charlotte Frances Haskins surrendered the lease of Fossedene and the land that surrounded it to St. John's College. She had inherited the house when her husband, Charles James Huskins, died a few years earlier. It is not clear exactly when Fossedene was built, but in the lease, it refers to a "dwelling house then recently erected." This map, included in the lease agreements, does not show The Gables and Whinside, even though at least Whinside would have been built at this point. The only other building shown is Ayerst Hall, opened by William Ayerst in 1884 as a hostel aimed at assisting poorer men with their education. In 1896, the Ayerst Hall building began to be used as accommodation for Cambridge students, and was later incorporated into St. Edmund's College.
The land where The Gables and Whinside now sit was acquired at the same time by St. John's College, in 1887. Whinside was designed by the architect Walter Bassett-Smith, likely built at some point soon after 1887. Whereas the boundaries of the land that Fossedene sits on were already decided in 1804, the leases from 1887 were the start of the boundaries around the Gables and Whinside. However, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this lease agreement was that it included a commitment to painting the outside of the house every three years: whether or not that was followed, I do not know. Records about who lived in these houses during this time are sparse; however, a 1915 mortgage agreement mentions Robert Drew Hicks of "Fossedene, Mount Pleasant", a fellow of Trinity College. He lived there with his wife until his death in 1929. In his obituary, Hicks was described as an "Aristotelian scholar", over the course of his lifetime demonstrating his "quality as a humanist and Aristotelian by the volume of Cambridge compositions which he edited. After losing his eyesight around 1900, he continued to work as an academic, and published a Latin dictionary in Braille in 1921. Records from the Cambridge Phililogical Society show Hicks listing his address as Fossedene, Mount Pleasant, as early as 1880.
All that's to say, although the lease was owned by St. John's College, it was not strictly used by them. A list of fellows of the Royal Society (FRS) from 1899 lists Ernest William Hobson, a fellow of Christ's College Cambridge, as living at The Gables, Mount Pleasant. In June 1908, a telegram that has been preserved in the archives of the Royal Society was directed to a Dr. Hobson at The Gables. It simply read, "Please return Cunningham's manuscript to Royal Society, urgent." His obituary, published by the Royal Society, reveals that in 1873 he was accepted to study Mathematics at Christ's, despite having earlier been rejected by Trinity. As someone who was pooled to Lucy, it is nice to know I am following in the footsteps of those who have lived in the Gables before me. Dr. Hobson was one of the first lecturers in Mathematics at Cambridge, and wrote five books on the subject during his lifetime. Though described as generally "radical" politically, he had a "curious touch of anti-feminism", and was "against women's degrees."
Other than these, records for who lived in The Gables, Whinside and Fossedene are hard to come by. However, it seems these houses were generally occupied by fellows and lecturers at Cambridge, and though they were owned by St. John's College, they were not used for the college specifically. In 1985, St. John's College leased The Gables and Fossedene to the Cambridge Centre for Sixth Form Studies (CCSS). Though it was a boarding school, it is unlikely that the houses were used for student accommodation at this point, as they were still designed for single occupancy. It is more likely that they were used for staff, or even as teaching spaces. The CCSS was absorbed into the Stephen Pearse Foundation in 2020, and though I contacted the latter, they have no records available from before their merger. The Gables and Fossedene were used for less than a decade by CCSS, as their lease expired in 1993 and was not renewed.
Planning permission was given in 1991 for Whinside to be turned into a "house of multiple occupancy", followed by The Gables in 1993 and Fossedene in 1994. After this, all three houses were used as postgraduate accommodation for St. John's College students. Minutes from Cambridge Council minutes in 1997 show that Lucy Cavendish asked for St. John's to bear them in mind if they were ever to sell the three houses. However, St. John's continued to use the houses until at least 2010. In 2023, Cambridge City Council granted St. John's permission to knock down The Gables, Whinside and Fossedene, and replace them with five new postgraduate accommodation buildings for St. John's. This decision was controversial, facing objections from local organisations such as Cambridge Past Present and Future, who were concerned about the impact these demolitions would have on protected trees in the area and the preservation of the area's character.
It has been incredible living in The Gables this year, but ultimately it is not the building that has made it so special, but instead the people who I have been lucky enough to call my housemates. If anything, it has been amazing in spite of the house; from my kitchen cupboard's spider infestation to cracks in the walls, The Gables is undoubtedly showing its age. Though there is evidently history contained within these walls, the mythic memories live on, regardless of whether the physical building lives on too. Long after The Gables is just a small note on some scarcely touched document in the St. John's College archives, I will remember when we were silly enough to watch a horror film in a creepy Victorian house, and got scared every time anyone opened the door. I will remember proposing to my now-college wife with a bouquet of roses, and a pot of pesto, to Love Story. I will remember making Christmas dinner together at the end of Michaelmas, and eating it in a room in which a fearless academic may well have been writing a book a century earlier.
"though representatives from St. John's have pointed out that bricks from the original houses will be repurposed into the new buildings, their demolition marks the end of an era for The Gables, Whinside and Fossedene."
On one of the notice boards by the front door, there is a handmade sign saying 'Gables, 2017-2018.' It's a nice reminder of those who lived here before us, a reminder that other people have shared fond memories in these buildings too. But ultimately, memories do not live on through buildings, but people. And, at the end of the day, The Gables is a mindset, not just a building!
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