Cambridge and I, well, we have history. I was born in Cambridge. My family has deep roots in the city, , my grandfather, my father, and my mother all Cambridge graduates. Growing up, Cambridge wasn’t a postcard town or a line on a CV, it was a landscape of stories.
My earliest photographic memories, trailing behind Dad as he studiously documented the rebuilding of Lion Yard, images destined to be exhibited alongside work by the great Edwin Smith, just one of those immeshed stories of the lives and talents Cambridge brought together.
It was here that I developed my eye. Cambridge teaches you to observe. The layered history, the formalities and informalities that you must, somehow, perhaps osmodicially, acquire. The confident precision of Cambridge life, all of it formed a kind of aesthetic grammar.
So when I was asked to photograph Donald Insall Associates’ long-running conservation work at Trinity College, the commission had a personal resonance unlike any other. Trinity has a mythic weight in my heart. It’s a place of May Balls and midnight walks, of lifelong friendships forged in cloisters, a place of my oldest friendships and character forming conversations.
To photograph the work of Donald Insall Associates in this context is to be asked not to dramatise but to reveal. Conservation, especially as Insall practises it, is not loud. It’s forensic, thoughtful, and fundamentally humble. Their work at Trinity is a quiet triumph, spanning decades of patient effort. Each intervention respects the fabric and intention of the original. Their guiding principle, “making good” but aiming always for “making better”, is fully alive here.
What does “making better” look like in a place like Trinity? Often, it’s imperceptible: a newly tooled stone that exactly echoes its neighbours, a roof rebuilt with historically accurate tiles that blend seamlessly with the original. Photographing this kind of work is an exercise in attention. It demands that you see not just what has changed, but how it has been changed, with judgement, skill, and a sensitivity to both time and place.
In doing this work, I often felt like I was entering a conversation not just with the building, but with the people who shaped it: the original masons and carpenters, the early scholars, the modern architects, and even my own family. A kind of personal archaeology.
Photographing Trinity College under the care of Donald Insall Associates deepened my appreciation for the idea that architecture is not a fixed object but a living continuum. Buildings, like people, require care, understanding, and a belief in their future. What Insall’s work affirms, and what I hope my photographs can convey, is that conservation is not about stasis. It is about renewal, continuity, and the elegant coexistence of old and new.
