The Radcliffe Camera is the defining image of Oxford — a great domed rotunda of golden Cotswold stone standing in the middle of Radcliffe Square, surrounded by the medieval buildings of Brasenose and All Souls colleges. Built in the Baroque style between 1737 and 1749, it originally housed the Radcliffe Science Library and now serves as a reading room for the Bodleian Library. Readers with a Bodleian card can work inside; everyone else gets the exterior.
The exterior alone rewards a long look. The building is circular, rising through a colonnaded drum to its lead-covered dome, and the scale is all the more impressive for being set amid such old surroundings. Radcliffe Square, with the Camera at its heart and the spires of the University Church of St Mary behind it, forms one of the great urban compositions in Britain. The Camera appears in almost every photograph ever taken of Oxford, but that cannot prepare you for how good it looks in person.