Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
UK academic institution
The Department of Engineering is an academic department within the School of Technology at the University of Cambridge.
The main site is situated at Trumpington Street, to the south of the city centre of Cambridge. The department is currently headed by Professor Colm Durkan.
History
Reverend Richard Jackson of Torrington, a former fellow of Trinity College, died in 1782, leaving a substantial portion of his estate to endow a Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy, which eventually became the Professorship of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics. This position was first held in 1875 by James Stuart. The first engineering workshop at Cambridge was constructed in 1878 in a wooden hut measuring fifty by twenty feet built in 1878, which was extended three times along Free School Lane by 1900, serving over 800 students by 1920.
The department now has several sites around Cambridge:
The main buildings are located at Trumpington Street and Fen Causeway on the Scroope House site, where most of the undergraduate teaching in the Engineering Tripos is carried out. The first building on the site, the Inglis Building (since extended and greatly modified twice) was started in 1920, following a large donation from Sir Dorabji Tata, and by 1932, the department had completely vacated the Free School Lane site.
The Baker Building was built in front of the Inglis Building and opened by the Duke of Edinburgh, on 13 November 1952. Further wings were added later, the last one in 1965 including a 334 seat lecture theatre.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5025593. Authority coordinates are 52.198, 0.122. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1782, 1875, 1878 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.