Inspiring Brilliance

Our current library facilities are now out of step with the needs of our academic community. As a result, they are limiting the academic experience at Pembroke and hindering opportunities for collaboration and innovation.

Through the Inspiring Brilliance initiative, Imagine Pembroke aims to transform the College into a fully-integrated and interdisciplinary community of scholars.

We will achieve this by building a new Research and Study Centre on the site of the present Macmillan Building. This will supersede the McGowin Library and substantially increase the number of reader spaces available to our students. Importantly, our graduate students will, for the first time, have their own dedicated space to work in College.

We will also create spaces within the building to bring together our leading research centres; to share our special collections with the broader public; and to foster student innovation through a start-up hub. The latter will go hand-in-hand with an Innovation Fund, established through the generosity of a recent alumnus, which will provide funding for students to turn their research into start-ups.

This will be Pembroke’s first fifth-century building and it will have a transformative impact on the College. Our Research and Study Centre document outlines our plans in more detail and identifies ways in which you can support this project.