Radcliffe Camera

Surely Oxford’s most photographed landmark, the sandy-gold Radcliffe Camera is a beautiful, light-filled, circular, columned library. Built between 1737 and 1749 in grand Palladian style, as ‘Radcliffe Library’, it’s topped by Britain’s third-largest dome. It's only been a ‘camera’, which simply means ‘room’, since 1860, when it lost its independence and became what it remains, a reading room of the Bodleian Library. The only way for nonmembers to see the interior is on an extended 1½-hour tour of the Bodleian.