Is this world-class, free gallery Cambridge’s best-kept secret?

Maggi Hambling, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley … Murray Edwards College houses the Women’s Art Collection, featuring some of the industry’s biggest names from the last 40 years

Museum shows can be expensive. Commercial galleries intimidating. And as for Cambridge colleges? They’re usually marked with signs saying things like “Closed to visitors” and “Keep off the grass”. Murray Edwards College, though, has a magnificent art collection that’s free to visit and open to the public all year round. And Harriet Loffler says you can do whatever you like on the lawn.

She’s the director of the Women’s Art Collection, a permanent fixture of modern and contemporary works by female artists at Murray Edwards, and one of the best-kept secrets in Cambridge. By the time she’s greeting me in the porter’s lodge of the college, I’ve already clocked two Tracey Emin lithographs. In the cafe is a screen print by the Guerrilla Girls and a charmingly clumsy canvas by Rose Wylie. In the corridors and rooms in between we pass pictures by Leonora Carrington, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Walker – and, astonishingly, we’re the only ones around.

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