By Basil Champneys. Neo-Tudor. Brick with stone dressings. Good details and carving. 2 storeys, main hall with two cross-wings. 4 bay screen entrance with buttresses behind and pinnacles with crowns. Ground floor has three light lattice windows, traceried windows to the hall. Staircases inside have attenuated columns and vaults. Bronze doors by Fred Thrupp, 1888, with George Herbert scenes, no longer in use. Professors' rooms have good Art-nouveau fireplaces.
This is a Grade II listed building in a late Gothic or Tudor style, to match St John's College opposite. Building materials: red brick with stone dressings, and sculptural enrichment added in the 1890s. The Divinity School was built on land leased from St John's College, and reverted to it in 1997. In recent years it has been very handsomely restored and refurbished. The location of the building is worth noting. Kevin Taylor writes, "The original Divinity School of c.1400 (now part of the Old Schools) was the centre of the University; and the central location of this successor indicates the continuing importance of the study of theology and related subjects at Cambridge".
Champney's building was praised at the time, with The Building News and Engineering Journal of 2 May 1879 describing it as having been treated "in a free and masterly way" and adding that it is "far beyond any other new work of the kind in Cambridge that we have seen". Later, Nikolaus Pevsner wrote appreciatively, "The style is early Tudor, the treatment lively and not at all pedantic," noting its "nearly symmetrical" front, with a "centre and somewhat projecting sides". Nevertheless, it was not featured among the best examples of Champneys' work in an Academy Architecture review of the architect in 1914 and a recent architectural critic calls it an "undersung building" which "deserves to be better known and appreciated".
The corner tower is a particularly attractive touch, giving an appropriately ecclesiastical feel to the whole. This side of the Divinity School is open to view because All Saints' Church, that once stood here, had been demolished in 1865. This left the open space of All Saints' Garden. Champneys also designed the Gothic memorial cross to the church that stands in the middle of the garden.
The statues were added in the empty niches as a result of the benefaction of a Mr Samuel Sanders. M.A. (Trinity), who in 1890 offered to have them sculpted to fill the niches. The sculptor/s or stone-masons responsible are unnamed. Possibly they were from the firm of Farmer and Brindley, which was responsible for so much of the important architectural sculpture of this time.