Homerton College is located in the south of Cambridge, although its first premises, acquired in 1768, were near Hackney Marshes in London. Founded as a nonconformist academy by dissenting Protestant thinkers, the College has retained a free-thinking spirit, reflected in its notable alumni. The design of the dining hall embraces this ethos by championing a new architectural language that is sympathetic to its context while introducing a new material and formal vocabulary. The core buildings on the current site were constructed in the 1870s for Cavendish College, with Homerton relocating there in 1894. The College became a full member of the University in 2010 and now offers all subjects, with the largest student body in Cambridge.

In recent years, Homerton has grown to be one of the largest of the Cambridge Colleges, creating a need for new facilities. The proposed building seeks to balance the practical demands of the new catering facilities with the desire to create an uplifting and celebratory dining space, able to host formal and symbolic events in the College calendar. The building’s organisational diagram brings guests together from two principal entrances – the College entrance, which is on axis with the Great Hall and Griffin Bar, and a public entrance from Harrison Drive into the buttery, the heart of the building and a communal gathering space that forms an anteroom to the primary space, the dining hall.

Drawing on the Arts and Crafts tradition, the new dining hall is announced by an undulating mantle of green faience, a handcrafted glazed ceramic popular on Victorian public buildings. Feilden Fowles worked closely with Darwen Terracotta to test and develop bespoke glazes that complement the College’s red brick and sandstone palette, as well as the lead and oxidised copper flèche of the Great Hall. The 3,200 tiles taper as they rise, revealing clerestory glazing illuminated at night. The relief echoes the Gothic Revival motifs of the adjacent hall and spire. Celebrating material integrity and craftsmanship, the façade also embraces contemporary construction and parametric modelling – an Arts and Crafts for the 21st century.

The hall’s main feature is a sweet chestnut glulam frame with a butterfly truss. It references traditional collegiate halls while inverting the pitched roof into a valley form. The frame was prefabricated off-site and assembled using handcrafted joints secured with oak dowels. Engineered timber offers greater stability than solid timber and is formed from smaller, faster-growing sections – here, coppiced sweet chestnut from a sustainable source. The structure supports a CLT deck, simplifying construction and avoiding complex secondary build-ups. At Homerton, the dining hall balances formality with comfort, becoming a social anchor where generous proportions and natural materials encourage people to gather, linger and share meals, events and study.