Lawrence Room, Girton College, Cambridge

The Lawrence Room Museum

Girton College was founded in 1869 as the first establishment in the UK to offer a university-level education to women. From the beginning, college members and supporters donated artworks and antiquities to the college. Many of these were brought together early in the twentieth century in a small museum, later named the Lawrence Room in memory of a former student, natural scientist Amy Lilian Lawrence (died 1934). Over the decades the display has been expanded and updated, but keeps an intimate, ‘family’ atmosphere.

The starting point of the collection was the discovery, while the college was being built in 1881, of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the grounds. Well over a hundred burials were excavated, dating from the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The artefacts buried with the dead included pottery urns, brooches, necklaces and personal grooming items and these can be seen in the museum.

In 1911, the college acquired the second main starting point for its collection, the Romano-Egyptian mummy known as Hermione. Hermione was discovered in the Roman cemetery at Hawara, near Cairo, by the pioneering archaeologist William Flinders Petrie. While the beauty of her portrait and the intricate pattern of her linen wrappings make the mummy remarkable, it is the inscription that makes her unique. Hermionê Grammatikê can be translated as ‘Hermione the language teacher’ or ‘Hermione the literary lady’. Such occupational markers on mummies, especially female ones, are very rare. Because of the inscription, Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda were keen that this mummy should go to a women’s college, and by paying a donation of £20 Girton was able to secure her. Hermione died some 2,000 years ago between the ages of 18 and 25, but she has become a lasting symbol of women’s education and the Girton community.

The museum collection was increased by legacies from former students. In 1919 Gwendolen Crewdson bequeathed a collection of Egyptian artefacts. They span over 5,000 years, from flint axes to funerary statues, amulets and scarabs from dynastic Egypt. Highlights include gaming pieces from a game of Senet, similar to chess, and four mummified baby crocodiles – raised as offerings to the gods – one of which is an ancient fake!

The foundations for the Classical section were laid in 1902, when another former student, Evelyn Saumarez, donated to the College her father’s collection of Tanagra figurines, acquired during his service as Secretary to the British Legation in Athens in the early 1870s. Tanagras are small, mould-cast terracotta statues of humans, animals and birds, dating to the fourth and third centuries BCE. Mostly found in graves, they may have had religious significance but some seem merely decorative or even playful. Further donations were made by Margaret Meyer, Ethelwyn Pearson and Alice Carthew, who gave the College its Mycenaean antiquities, including a Cycladic figurine from Melos.

Girton has a number of artefacts that do not fit precisely into the main collections. First among these is a group of very early pieces from ancient Mesopotamia. These are mostly small alabaster ‘eye-idols’ from the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak, dating from approximately 3,000 BCE. They were presented by Dr Joan Oates, a Fellow and Tutor at Girton, who, with her husband David, excavated at Tell Brak for over 40 years. There are also artefacts from pre-Roman Carthage and other parts of the Mediterranean world, and from as far afield as China and New Zealand.

Your visit

We are open to visitors every Thursday from 2 to 4 p.m., both in and outside the University term. Admission is free and no booking is required for small groups. Due to constraints of space, no more than 15 visitors at a time are allowed into the Lawrence Room, but arrangements can be made for larger groups to visit in relays.

Photography is permitted but no flash, please.

Free parking is available: for directions please follow the link https://www.girton.cam.ac.uk/travel-directions/girton-college