Join Geoffrey Tyack as he takes a virtual walk around Oxford's Radcliffe Square, the heart of the University of Oxford
Radcliffe Camera, Credit: Dr Geoffrey Tyack
Until the Oxford Study Tour can be conducted in person – hopefully in Autumn 2021 – Dr Geoffrey Tyack will introduce some of the university buildings and spaces we would have encountered in passing. The first presentation will be on the area in which the University – the third oldest in Europe – began. Bounded to the south by St Mary’s church (the University Church) and the 14th-century Congregation House, and to the north by Broad Street, it incorporates the 15th-century Divinity School; the Bodleian Library and the Schools Quadrangle (1613-19); Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (1664-9); the Old Ashmolean Museum (1679-83); Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building (1712-15); and James Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera, completed in 1749. The Radcliffe Camera forms the centrepiece of a planned urban landscape, Radcliffe Square, named after the wealthy physician and benefactor Dr John Radcliffe (1652-1714), an alumnus of University College who also financed the Radcliffe Infirmary and the Radcliffe Observatory, both of which will feature in the second presentation.
Geoffrey Tyack MA MLitt Oxford, PhD London, FSA, FRHist.Soc. is Fellow Emeritus of Kellogg College, Oxford and former Director of Stanford University’s undergraduate programme in Oxford where he has taught urban and architectural history. His main academic interests are in British and European architectural history, especially from the C18 to the C20, and the history of urban planning since the Renaissance. Among his many publications are: Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London (Cambridge University Press 1992); Oxford: an Architectural Guide (Oxford University Press 1998); Modern Architecture in an Oxford College: St John’s 1945–2005 (OUP 2005). His most recent projects concern on books on the historical development of the British urban landscape and on the architecture of Oxford’s colleges. He has been President of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society and a Trustee of the Oxford Preservation Trust.
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