Tag Archives: St. John’s College Cambridge

Cambridge~ Monday March 9th

I’m working on finishing off my posts about our days in Cambridge. These posts are from Monday March 9th.

I’ve already posted about our early morning walk and seeing the famous clock here.

And I also posted about our lunch at The Eagle and all about it’s history here.

On this same day we visited the beautiful Wren Library.

From the Wren Library we continued on enjoying ‘the backs’. ‘The Backs’ is an area to the east of Queen’s Road in the city of Cambridge, England, where several colleges of the University of Cambridge back on to the River Cam with their grounds covering both banks of the river.

St. John’s College

1776 & 1779 William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson begin their studies at St John’s. Joining forces in 1787, they will spend the rest of their lives leading the campaign to abolish the slave trade and slavery

1787 William Wordsworth arrives as a 17-year-old Cumbrian undergraduate.  With his sympathy for the common man and love of nature, he becomes a central figure in shaping English Romanticism and perhaps our most famed alumnus

This is a photo of the back of the building where the Wren Library is housed.

Punting along the river Cam which is a major tourist draw. We did not choose to take a ride.

Signs like this were all along the sidewalk along Queen’s Road.

We made our way along the road for our destination for refreshment and along the way we saw many signs of the promise of Spring.

We were beat by the time we found the Pickerel Inn which is now a traditional public house established in 1608.

After our treat we walked back to our lodgings just a short .3 miles from the Pickerel.

The dish towels in our kitchenette had this saying on them.

The door signs made us chuckle, too.

We stayed in for this evening after it seemed we were walking all the day long.

We were looking forward to being able to make our own coffee in our room on Tuesday morning since we purchased a French Press and coffee while out and about this day.

The Wren Library

Cambridge is a town that affords you many great architectural treats. On our way to the Wren Library which is part of Trinity College we enjoyed many. This day was still Monday March 9th and our first full day in Cambridge.

There is a lot of history in this library and many important documents. If you are interested you can read more here.

A detailed description of the window can be found here.

A.A. Milne attended Trinity college and some original manuscripts from Winnie the Pooh are featured in the Wren Library. Some interesting reading here.

This was a beautiful day in Cambridge and we enjoyed some views at the back of Trinity and other colleges, too.

A view of the Wren from the Backs.

A view of St. John’s college.

They have a claim to fame of C.S. Lewis visiting here during his time in Cambridge.

They also claim to be the oldest pub.

We had our last meal of the day at the Mitre.

Love the signs of spring we are seeing…

So this was Monday and we had 4 more full days in Cambridge. It will take lots of posts to cover everything we have seen and experienced. Today, Thursday the 12th of March, was a very blustery day. The kind of wind that moved you along. We still had sunshine break through. Our weather here has been fabulous with no rain so far. Time will tell if we get rained upon. Thank you, friends, for following along with us.