University Church of St Mary the Virgin

The best rooftop view in Oxford, from the building the University actually began in — and the only place you look down on Radcliffe Square rather than across it.

St Mary the Virgin is the reason the centre of Oxford looks the way it does. A church stood here before the Domesday survey of 1086, and by 1252 the University's Congregation was meeting in it — this was the University's first home, its first library and its first debating chamber long before there were purpose-built rooms for any of them. Around 1320 a two-storey building was added on the north side: the convocation house below, and above it the books left by Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, which formed the first university library. The body of the church was substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but the tower is far older, dating from about 1270, with its richly pinnacled spire added in the 1320s. Tower and spire together reach 191 feet. The Baroque south porch on the High Street was added in 1637 by Nicholas Stone, master mason to Charles I, paid for by Archbishop Laud's chaplain Morgan Owen: twisted columns, a broken pediment and a statue of the Virgin and Child that scandalised Puritan opinion and still carries musket damage from the Civil War. It is also where the Oxford Martyrs — Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer — were tried for heresy in 1555, and where John Henry Newman preached as vicar from 1828 until he resigned in 1843 on his way to Rome. The church is free to enter. The tower is ticketed, reached by a narrow spiral stair, and worth it: the platform looks straight down into Radcliffe Square, level with the Camera's dome, with All Souls, the Bodleian and the whole ridge of spires laid out around you. It is the view that appears on the covers, taken from the one place you can stand to see it.