Henry Castree Hughes

Henry Castree Hughes (29 May 1893 – 1 January 1976), known as H. C. Hughes or Hugh Hughes, The Mond Building, a white-brick laboratory featuring a rotunda decorated with a carved crocodile by Eric Gill, together with its adjacent workshop (also by Hughes), are the earliest university buildings in Cambridge designed in the Modernist style. Fen Court, Peterhouse, is described in its grade II listing as "the only pre-war Cambridge college accommodation building in the International Modern style and the forerunner to other college buildings constructed at both Oxford and Cambridge after the war". Two further private houses from this period are also Modernist in style: 19 Wilberforce Road (1933–34), described in Bradley and Pevsner as "rather heavily done", and the grade-II-listed Brandon Hill (now Salix) on Conduit Head Road (1933–34), an L-shaped building with corner windows and a roof terrace, designed for the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant. 173 Huntingdon Road, a "quirky" house with a prominent staircase window built for the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza; and a house with Italianate decoration on Buckingham Road (c. 1933), later adapted to form part of the Blackfriars Dominican Priory. Hughes also designed seven or more houses in the nearby village of Grantchester, and numerous Cambridgeshire parish churches including those of Shepreth (1922–23), Balsham, Barton, Kingston, Little Eversden, Great Eversden, Harlton and Grantchester. and undertook considerable renovation work for the Cambridge colleges. He also restored cottages, mainly in Grantchester and Abington,

Hughes had a lifelong interest in windmills, which led him to survey and photograph these structures across Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely with J. H. Bullock in 1930–31; his photographs are archived by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. and wrote on vernacular buildings and the landscape designer, Humphry Repton.

Source Simon Bradley, Nikolaus Pevsner. Cambridgeshire (The Buildings of England series) (Yale University Press; 2014)