Bodleian Library

Where it sits. The Bodleian occupies the block of central Oxford bounded by Broad Street, Catte Street and the Radcliffe Square, a five-minute walk north-east of Carfax. It is not one building but a group: the fifteenth-century Divinity School, the Old Schools Quadrangle of 1613-1619, the domed Radcliffe Camera of 1737-1749 across the square, the Clarendon Building, and the Weston Library on the north side of Broad Street. Underground tunnels and a book conveyor link them. The Bridge of Sighs over New College Lane, often photographed as part of the ensemble, actually belongs to Hertford College.

The story behind it. Oxford's first university library was Duke Humfrey's, founded on a gift of manuscripts from Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in the 1440s. It was gutted during the Edwardian Reformation of 1550, when commissioners removed and burned works considered superstitious, and the empty room's furniture was sold in 1556. Sir Thomas Bodley, a diplomat and Merton fellow who had married a wealthy widow, undertook to restore it at his own expense; the library reopened in 1602 with about 2,000 volumes and has carried his name since. In 1610 Bodley struck an agreement with the Stationers' Company that gave the library a copy of every book registered in London — the origin of the legal deposit system that still applies. That agreement is why the collection now runs to more than 13 million printed items across the Bodleian Libraries, second in Britain only to the British Library. Bodley funded the Schools Quadrangle before his death in 1613; its Tower of the Five Orders, on the east side, stacks Doric, Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite columns in ascending storeys as a lesson in classical architecture, with a seated statue of James I above the gate.

On screen. Two spaces inside the complex carried Harry Potter work, and both are open to visitors. The Divinity School, the vaulted ground-floor room of the oldest building, served as the Hogwarts hospital wing across the first four films, and in Goblet of Fire it is the room where Professor McGonagall drills Ron Weasley in ballroom dancing before the Yule Ball. Duke Humfrey's Library on the floor above became the Hogwarts library, including the Restricted Section that Harry enters under his invisibility cloak in Philosopher's Stone. The library imposed a strict condition on the production: no naked flame anywhere in Duke Humfrey's, which is why Harry carries a lamp rather than a candle in the shots taken there. Everything else that reads as Hogwarts in those sequences — the shelves that lurch, the shrieking book, the corridor Harry escapes into — was built or extended at Leavesden. It is a genuine location, in other words, but a heavily conditioned one.

What you actually see today. The Old Schools Quadrangle is free to enter and worth ten minutes on its own for the painted doorways naming the medieval faculties — Schola Naturalis Philosophiae, Schola Musicae and the rest — that survive around the walls. Beyond that, access is by ticket. A short self-guided visit covers the Divinity School. Guided tours of thirty, sixty or ninety minutes add Duke Humfrey's Library, the Convocation House and Chancellor's Court, and, on the longest option, the Radcliffe Camera's Upper Reading Room and the underground Gladstone Link. The Convocation House, with its plain 1630s panelling and pendant vault, is where Parliament sat while Charles I held Oxford during the Civil War, and where the university's governing body still meets. The Weston Library across Broad Street is free and holds rotating exhibitions from the special collections — Magna Carta engrossments, Shelley's notebooks, the Tolkien archive, Mendelssohn autographs — along with the Blackwell Hall café under a fine 1930s coffered ceiling.

Getting there and timing. Oxford station is fifteen minutes on foot; trains from London Paddington and Marylebone take about an hour, and the Oxford Tube coach runs through the night from Victoria. The centre is closed to general traffic, so use the park-and-ride. Tours are capped at small numbers and sell out days ahead in summer; children under eleven cannot join the Duke Humfrey's tours, a rule that surprises families arriving specifically for the film connection. Reading rooms remain in academic use, so silence is enforced and photography inside Duke Humfrey's is not permitted. The Divinity School has step-free access; Duke Humfrey's is reached by a stone spiral stair, and the library can arrange alternative access with notice.