Trinity College

Henry VIII finished King's College Chapel and founded Trinity College in 1546, in the last year of his life, by merging 2 existing colleges together.

The dissolution of the monasteries had given him considerable resources to do it with.

Trinity was - and still is - the richest college in Cambridge.

Its landholdings alone are worth around 800 million pounds - and include the O2 Arena in London and 3,500 acres of Britain's busiest container port (the Port of Felixstowe).

The Great Court, built in the late 16th century, is said to be the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe.

Another famed part of the college is the Wren Library, designed by Christopher Wren and completed in the late 17th century.

The college is also an academic powerhouse.

Trinity alumni have won 34 Nobel Prizes, around a quarter of all those won by members of the University of Cambridge, and it has produced 6 British prime ministers.

Some of its famous alumni include, in the sciences, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr and Srinivasa Ramanujan... and in the arts Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, Vladimir Nabokov, A. A. Milne, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell - whom the college dismissed for his anti-war campaigning before taking him back.

Fun fact : the tree in New Court that visitors are told is Newton's apple tree is not in fact Newton's apple tree (the real one is in his home in Lincolnshire).

Byron, for his part, is said to have kept a pet bear while living in college, though it might be a legend.