Blog
13 October 2026
The college’s photograph archive contains a marvellous collection of plate glass negatives created by Alfred Rose between c.1890 and 1914. Rose was a member of Emmanuel for 60 years, being admitted in 1859, becoming a Fellow in 1863, and dying in college in 1919. He also served as Bursar for some years, relinquishing the office in 1893. His photographs show parts of Emmanuel that rarely, if ever, featured in the postcards sold by the thousands in local shops, and they are therefore a unique record of the college’s appearance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Here you can see views of the front and rear facades of Old Court. This building was erected in 1633-34, to solve the college’s student accommodation problem. Emmanuel was at that time such a populous college – its annual intake occasionally surpassed even that of Trinity – that some of its students had to board in the town’s lodging houses, with all the attendant dangers of alehouses, bawdy houses and other sinks of iniquity. Old Court was reputedly thrown up on the cheap and was later said to have been held up only by its chimney stacks, but it fortunately escaped demolition, as it is undoubtedly one of Emmanuel’s most attractive buildings. The stucco applied to the rear façade, visible in Rose’s photo, had to be removed in the mid-twentieth century as it had caused a serious damp problem, and several stretches of brickwork had to be renewed.
Amanda Goode, College Archivist