King's College

Both the river and the main streets of Cambridge lie on a north-south axis. The city's main thoroughfare has shifted further eastwards over the years as the University has come to colonise the river banks – until the present day, when the commercial focus of Cambridge for many residents is the Grafton shopping centre, almost a mile to the east. In the later Middle Ages, King Henry VI ordained that Milne Street, one of the principal arteries of the medieval city, should be cut off abruptly to make way for a new river site accommodating what would be the biggest and grandest of all the colleges to date, named appropriately: King's College. The interrupted line of Milne Street still runs to the north (what is now Trinity Lane) and south (Queens' Lane, leading past Queens' College into Silver Street). What was the medieval high street is now King's Parade, running along the east side of the King's site, and from here the visitor may admire the college's elaborate nineteenth-century gothic gate and screen. Though by no means the oldest of Cambridge's 31 colleges, King's remains the focal point for many visitors; it dates from 1441 and is a year younger than Eton College near Windsor, a school (also founded by Henry VI) with which King's has had strong architectural and educational connections.

In the Middle Ages the principal focus of any college was its chapel, and Henry VI himself laid the foundation stone in 1446.