Feilden Fowles have completed a striking new faïence-clad dining hall at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, after winning an international open-call design competition in 2017. The project was born out of the College’s need to create new catering and dining facilities adequate to serve its growing student numbers. Renovation of existing facilities was explored but found to be an insufficient solution. The new building for Cambridge’s youngest college comprises a dining hall, buttery, kitchens and associated staff amenities on a 3,000m2 site adjacent to the Arts and Crafts style Ibberson Building (1914) and Victorian Gothic Revival buildings.

Homerton College sits to the south of the city of Cambridge. Its core buildings were constructed in the 1870s for Cavendish College, with Homerton College moving to the site in 1894 from its original home on Homerton High Street in East London. Founded in 1768 by a group of dissenting academics, it has retained its free-thinking roots. Formerly a teacher training college, Homerton became a full College of the University of Cambridge in 2010, and now, as Cambridge’s largest College by student number, offers all the subjects taught by the University. It has expanded to inhabit a greater proportion of its significant 10-hectare mature grounds, which encompass a large lawn and gardens, an orchard and sports pitches.

The site for the Dining Hall development is located on the north edge of the site, at the western end of a run of existing buildings and sitting adjacent to the listed Ibberson Building, constructed in 1914 in the Arts and Crafts style.

In recent years Homerton has grown to one of the largest of the Cambridge Colleges creating a need for new facilities, sized to cater to their whole community. The proposed building seeks to balance the practical demands of the new catering facilities with the need 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.

The ritual of dining together is central to Cambridge college life, requiring a balance of formality and comfort. At Homerton, the new Dining Hall has become a social anchor — a space for ceremony and everyday gathering alike. Its generous proportions and natural materials foster inclusivity and belonging, supporting both intimate meals and formal occasions. The building strengthens tradition while opening new possibilities for communal life, creating a welcoming heart for the college community.

The hall’s main feature is a sweet chestnut glulam timber frame and butterfly truss, echo traditional collegiate halls, albeit inverting the more typical pitched form into a valley-shaped roof. The frame was fabricated offsite and installed by a family team using traditional handcrafted carpentry joints fastened with oak dowels between the columns and beams. Feilden Fowles in conjunction with Structure Workshop have designed an engineered timber frame minimising waste on site and locking up carbon. Engineered timber is more stable than cut timber or solid timber, simplifying cladding and envelope details. It is generally made from smaller sections of faster growing timber, in this case coppiced sweet chestnut, a highly sustainable source of timber. The expressed primary timber frame supports a CLT deck simplifying the construction process and avoiding secondary and tertiary build-ups.

Lord Simon Woolley – Principal, Homerton College Cambridge

Drawing on the Arts and Crafts tradition, the new dining hall is crowned by an undulating mantle of green faience — popular for public buildings in the UK during the Victorian era. Feilden Fowles collaborated closely with Darwen Terracotta, one of the country’s few remaining architectural ceramics fabricators, carefully testing glazes to achieve colours and textures that harmonise with Homerton’s red brick, sandstone detailing, and the green oxidised copper flèche of the adjacent Great Hall. The 3,200 tiles taper as they climb, to reveal high-level clerestory glazing that is illuminated from the interior at night, giving the building a glowing presence when viewed across the grounds. The relief of the faience echoes formal motifs of the Gothic Revival Great Hall (1889) and its elegant spire.

We took inspiration from German artists and weaver Anni Albers who combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art.

The architecture celebrates the integrity and inherent beauty of materials and craftsmanship, where ornamentation is a product of the natural beauty and imperfection of the handmade. It also embraces new methods of construction and engineering technologies of today, such as the use of parametric modelling to develop the faience façade – an Arts and Crafts of the 21st century.