Radcliffe Camera

The Radcliffe Camera is the round building that everyone draws when they draw Oxford. It stands alone in the middle of Radcliffe Square, a drum of honey-coloured stone ringed by paired Corinthian columns and capped by a dome with a lantern, so that the colleges, the University Church and the Bodleian's Old Schools seem to be arranged around it. The name is simply Latin: camera means a chamber, and this was the Radcliffe room, the first circular library in England.

The money came from the physician John Radcliffe, who died in 1714 leaving £40,000 to the university for a new library. The bequest could only be released after the death of his sisters, the last of them in 1736, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had made the first designs, died that same year. The commission passed to James Gibbs, who laid the foundation stone on 17 May 1737; the building was finished in 1748 and opened on 13 April 1749. Gibbs combined the sobriety of English Palladianism with a Baroque sense of drama: a heavily rusticated ground storey carries the giant order of the upper floors, and the dome gathers the whole composition into a single upward movement.

The interior is as fine as the outside promises. The domed upper reading room, ringed by galleries, is decorated with delicate stucco by the Italian plasterer Giuseppe Artari, and a marble statue of Radcliffe by John Michael Rysbrack watches over the readers. Since the 1860s the Camera has served as a reading room of the Bodleian Library; it is joined to the main library by the Gladstone Link, a tunnel and underground book store laid out beneath the square in 1912 and refurbished in 2011, so that hundreds of thousands of volumes are kept below the cobbles without a trace on the surface.

Even from outside, though, it repays a slow circuit of the square, where each side frames it against a different set of spires and quadrangles.

Getting there

The Radcliffe Camera is in the centre of Oxford, about 15 minutes' walk from Oxford railway station. The nearest major airport is London Heathrow (LHR), about 80 km by road; the Airline coach and other express coaches link it with Oxford around the clock. Southampton Airport (SOU), some 90 km south, is closer for some regional flights.