Museum sights in Oxfordshire
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River & Rowing Museum
Life in Henley has always focused on the river, and this impressive museum takes a look at the town's relationship with the Thames, the history of rowing, and the wildlife and commerce supported by the river. Hands-on activities and interactive displays make it a good spot for children, and the Wind in the Willows exhibition brings Kenneth Grahame's stories of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad to life.
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University & Pitt Rivers Museums
Housed in a glorious Victorian Gothic building with slender, cast-iron columns, ornate capitals and a soaring glass roof, the University Museum is worth a visit for its architecture alone. However, the real draw is the mammoth natural-history collection of more than five million exhibits, ranging from exotic insects and fossils to a towering T. Rex skeleton and the remains of the first ever dinosaur ever to be mentioned in a written text (1677).
Hidden away through a door at the back of the main exhibition hall, the wonderful Pitt Rivers Museum is an anthropologist’s wet dream – a treasure trove of objects from around the world to satisfy any armchair adventurer and a…
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Oxford University Press Museum
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University Museum
Oxford has some excellent (free) museums, among them the University Museum of Natural History, famous for its dinosaur and dodo skeletons, and the attached (and incomparable) Pitt Rivers Museum, an Aladdin’s cave spread over three floors and crammed with such things as voodoo dolls and shrunken heads from the Caribbean and Pacific. Visitors are given torches (flashlights) to ‘explore’ the lower Court Gallery and are allowed to open all the drawers. Great stuff.
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C
Museum of the History of Science
Science, art, celebrity and nostalgia come together at this fascinating museum where the exhibits include everything from a blackboard used by Einstein to the world’s finest collection of historic scientific instruments, all housed in a beautiful 17th-century building.
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D
Museum of Oxford
A bit dated but still interesting , this is the place to brush up on the history of the city and university, from Oxford’s prehistoric mammoths to its history of car manufacturing.
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E
Museum of Oxford
Though it often gets overlooked in favour of Oxford’s other museums, this is an absorbing romp through the city’s history – from the Roman and Saxon eras to the Victorian era and 20-century industries, such as marmalade-making and car manufacture. The reconstructions of period interiors, such as a 19th-century Jericho kitchen, are particularly good.
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F
Ashmolean Museum
Britain’s oldest public museum, and second in repute only to London’s British Museum, the museum was established in 1683 when Elias Ashmole presented the university with the collection of curiosities – which came be to known as Tradescant’s Ark – amassed by the well-travelled John Tradescant, gardener to Charles I.
Its collections, displayed in bright, spacious galleries within one of Britain’s best examples of neo-Grecian architecture, span the world and include everything from Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi, Islamic and Chinese art, Japan’s ‘floating world’ and examples of the earliest written languages to rare porcelain, tapestries and silverware, priceless…
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G
University Museum of Natural History
Oxford has some excellent (free) museums, among them the University Museum of Natural History, famous for its dinosaur and dodo skeletons, and the attached (and incomparable) Pitt Rivers Museum, an Aladdin’s cave spread over three floors and crammed with such things as voodoo dolls and shrunken heads from the Caribbean and Pacific. Visitors are given torches (flashlights) to ‘explore’ the lower Court Gallery and are allowed to open all the drawers. Great stuff.
reviewed
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H
Pitt Rivers Museum
Oxford has some excellent (free) museums, among them the University Museum of Natural History, famous for its dinosaur and dodo skeletons, and the attached (and incomparable) Pitt Rivers Museum, an Aladdin’s cave spread over three floors and crammed with such things as voodoo dolls and shrunken heads from the Caribbean and Pacific. Visitors are given torches (flashlights) to ‘explore’ the lower Court Gallery and are allowed to open all the drawers. Great stuff.
reviewed
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