The short street linking Broad Street and the High — past the Bodleian, the Bridge of Sighs and All Souls.
Catte Street is the short north-south link between the High Street and the junction of Broad Street and Holywell Street, where it continues as Parks Road. It runs along the eastern side of Radcliffe Square and is one of the densest stretches of monumental Oxford architecture in the city.
On the west side, working north from the High, are the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, the Radcliffe Camera (in Radcliffe Square), the Bodleian Library's Schools Quadrangle with its Tower of the Five Orders, and at the top end the Clarendon Building and the Sheldonian Theatre facing Broad Street. On the east side stand All Souls College, with its twin towers facing the square, and at the north end the medieval Chapel of St Mary at Smith Gate (now Hertford College's Middle Common Room) and the Bridge of Sighs, the Hertford Bridge that crosses Catte Street to join Hertford's two quadrangles.
The street has had several names. It was Kattestreete in the early thirteenth century, Mousecatchers' Lane (Vicus Murilegorum) by 1442, and Cat Street through the eighteenth. The Victorians renamed it Catherine Street; in 1930 the City Council restored the medieval form as Catte Street, using a fifteenth-century spelling.
Historical names: Cat Street, Catherine Street, Mousecatchers' Lane
Sources: Wikipedia: Catte Street · OpenStreetMap
James Gibbs's English Palladian rotunda (1749) — the first circular library in the country and the most photographed building in Oxford.
The Jacobean entrance tower of the Bodleian — a single building demonstrating all five classical orders, stacked vertically.
