The Victorian Colleges

As mentioned, Cambridge founded almost no new colleges between 1500s-1800s.

Then in the 19th century it founded 4, and all of them were answers to the same question : who was the university actually for.

The first issue was the education of women - and the road to gender equality at Cambridge was a long and painful one.

Women sat the same examinations as men from the 1870s - and sometimes outperformed them - but the university declined to award them actual degrees, and only admitted them to the exams formally in 1881.

Girton was founded in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon - a campaigner for women's suffrage and education, and an artist and feminist - to house women who attended classes and passed exams (but didn't get awarded degrees until 1948!).

It was the first women's college at Cambridge, and was deliberately built 2.5 miles outside the town, far enough from the male colleges to blunt the objections of people who thought the whole idea improper.

Its famous alumni include Hertha Ayrton, the first woman to read her own paper to the Royal Society, and Baroness Hale, the first woman to preside over the UK Supreme Court.

Newnham then followed suit in 1871, founded by suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, educationalist Anne Jemima Clough, and philosopher Henry Sidgwick - and was placed much closer in.

Being so close made it a target : when the university voted in 1921 to go on refusing women full membership, male undergraduates battered down its gates with a handcart.

Its famous alumnae include Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work underpinned the discovery of the structure of DNA, poet Sylvia Plath, classicist Mary Beard and actor Emma Thompson.

Hughes Hall came in 1885 as a training college for women teachers, taking its name from Elizabeth Phillips Hughes, its first principal and a leading campaigner for women's education.

It now accepts mostly postgraduates and mature students.

The second issue was money.

Selwyn arrived in 1882, and was built next to Newnham, for men of moderate means as the Bishop it commemorates wanted a Cambridge that poorer students could afford.

Fun fact : when Millicent Fawcett's daughter Philippa sat the Mathematical Tripos in 1890 she beat every man in her year.

The correct name for that feat is becoming "Senior Wrangler" but as a woman she could not be given a rank of her own, nor a degree, so was just called "above the Senior Wrangler".

When the last of the all-male colleges (Magdalene) finally admitted women in 1988, some colleges flew their flags at half mast and some students and staff wore black armbands to deplore the decision.

Today only Newnham and Murray Edwards remain women-only.