Clarevoices

At 700, Clare is one of Cambridge's oldest colleges, but its choir is youthful and full of life, finds Andrew Stewart

- 

Soon after landing in England in the autumn of 1326, Isabella of France, estranged wife of Edward II, and her mercenary army mustered in Cambridge. The fenland town had acquired a second college just six months earlier, an impoverished institution called University Hall. Its fortunes changed later when Elizabeth de Clare, sister-in-law of Isabella's sworn enemy, Hugh Despenser, and one of the country's richest women, endowed the renamed Clare Hall and became its chief benefactor. Clare College, as it has been known since Victorian times, enters its 700th year as a centre of academic excellence with a proud international reputation. That reputation has been enhanced over the past half century by Clare College Choir, whose work flows from the weekly round of choral evensong to reach a worldwide audience through recordings, concert tours and live streams of Sunday services in Clare's snug chapel.