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Henry VI founded King's College (tel 01223/331100) in 1441, but he was disappointed with his initial efforts, so four years later he cleared away half of medieval Cambridge to make room for a much grander foundation. His plans were ambitious, but the Wars of the Roses - and bouts of royal insanity - intervened and by the time of his death in 1471 very little had been finished. Indeed, work on Henry's Great Court hadn't even started and the site remained empty for three hundred years. The present complex - facing King's Parade from behind a long stone screen - is largely neo-Gothic, built in the 1820s to a design by William Wilkins. However, Henry's workmen did start on the college's finest building, the much celebrated King's College Chapel (term time Mon-Fri 9.30am-3.30pm, Sat 9.30am-3.15pm, Sun 1.15-2.15pm; rest of year Mon-Sat 9.30am-4.30pm, Sun 10am-5pm; GBP3.50), on the north side of today's Great Court. Committed to canvas by Turner and Canaletto, and eulogized in three sonnets by Wordsworth, it's now best known for its boys' choir , whose members process across the college grounds during term time in their antiquated garb to sing evensong (Tues-Sat at 5.30pm) and carols on Christmas Eve. Begun in 1446 and over sixty years in the making, the chapel is an extraordinary building. From the outside, it seems impossibly slender, its streamlined buttresses channelling up to a dainty balustrade and four spiky turrets, but the exterior was, in a sense at least, a happy accident - its design predicated by the carefully composed interior. Here, in the final flowering of the Gothic style, the mystery of the Christian faith was expressed by a long, uninterrupted nave flooded with kaleidoscopic patterns of light filtering in through copious stained-glass windows. Like Oxford's New College, King's enjoyed an exclusive supply of students from one of the country's public schools - in this case, Eton - and until 1851 claimed the right to award its students degrees without taking any examinations. The first non-Etonians were only accepted in 1873. Times have changed since those days, and, if anything, King's is now one of the more progressive colleges, having been one of the first to admit women in 1972. Among its most famous alumni are E.M. Forster, who described his experiences in Maurice , film director Derek Jarman, poet Rupert Brooke and John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories did much to improve the college's finances when he became the college bursar.
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