The Radcliffe Camera (colloquially known as the "Rad Cam" or "The Camera"; from Latin camera, meaning 'room') is a building of the University of Oxford, England, designed by James Gibbs in a Baroque style and built in 1737–49 to house a library, ultimately becoming a reading room of the Bodleian Library, not open to the public, after the original library moved out. It is sited to the south of the Old Bodleian, north of the Church of St Mary the Virgin, and between Brasenose College to the west and All Souls College to the east. The Radcliffe Camera's circularity, its position in the heart of Oxford, and its separation from other buildings make it the focal point of the University of Oxford, and as such it is almost always included in shorthand visual representations of the university. The library's construction and maintenance was funded from the estate of John Radcliffe, a physician who left £40,000 upon his death in 1714; the library was not ready to open until 1749. Until 1810, the library housed books covering a wide range of subjects, but under George Williams it was brought up to date from a state of neglect, and focus narrowed to the sciences, although by 1850 the Radcliffe Library still lagged behind the Bodleian. At this point librarian Henry Wentworth Acland arranged for the Radcliffe Library building to merge with the university, and the library's collection to be moved, ultimately to the newly constructed Radcliffe Science Library, a legal deposit member of the Bodleian Libraries; the building became known as the Radcliffe Camera, and used as a reading room for the Bodleian, to which it is connected by a tunnel, and an underground book store.
History
Background John Radcliffe (c.1650–1714) attended University College from the age of thirteen, becoming a fellow of Lincoln College at eighteen. In a successful medical career, his patients included William III and Queen Anne. He built up a large fortune and died childless. He is buried in St. Mary's Church, Oxford. It was known that he intended to build a library in Oxford at least two years before his death in 1714. It was thought that the new building would be an extension westwards of the Selden End of the Bodleian Library. Francis Atterbury, Dean of Christ Church, writing in December 1712 describes plans for a 90 ft room on the site of neighbouring Exeter College, and that the lower storey would be a library for Exeter College and the upper story Radcliffe's Library.
Radcliffe dedicated £100 a year to furnishing his proposed library with books. Plans were prepared by Nicholas Hawksmoor and are now held in the Ashmolean Museum. By 1714, however, Radcliffe had settled on a different site for his new library, to the south of the existing Bodleian. William Pittis, Radcliffe's first biographer, ascribes the change of heart to excessive demands from the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College.
Plans Radcliffe died on 1 November 1714. His will, proved on 8 December, provided for the building of a new library on the new site, stating:
And will that my executors pay forty thousand pounds in the terme of ten years, by yearly payments of four thousand pounds, the first payment thereof to begin and be made after the decease of my said two sisters for the building a library in Oxford and the purchaseing the houses between St Maries and the scholes in Catstreet where I intend the Library to be built, and when the said Library is built I give one hundred and fifty pounds per annum for ever to the Library Keeper thereof for the time being and one hundred pounds a year per annum for ever for buying books for the same Library. It also provided £100 a year to maintain the new library, but only once 30 years had elapsed from his death. The library-keeper was to be chosen by several influential figures: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Winchester, the Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench and the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and the Master of the Rolls. The first payment was to be made after the death of Radcliffe's two sisters, Hannah Redshaw and Millicent Radcliffe. The latter lived until 1736, although it appears between the death of Redshaw in 1716 and Millicent Radcliffe in 1736, much preparatory work was done acquiring the site for the library.
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