The University Museum

Image: © Natasha Ceridwen de Chroustchoff Taken: 4 Mar 2008

The building is justly celebrated for its architecture as much as the variety its contents and the erudition of its occupants. Completed in 1860 by a leading proponent of Victorian Gothic, Benjamin Woodward, it was both admired and reviled as a kind of secular cathedral. In the very year of its opening it was the venue for the notorious debate between the fundamentalist bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Thomas Huxley, on Darwin's theory of evolution. The scientific departments originally housed in the museum soon outgrew the space and spread into what became the Science Area to the rear. The Radcliffe Science Library was constructed to the right. If this were not enough, the museum also harbours the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the finest ethnological and anthropological collections in the world, which occupies a separate building accessed through the main museum. The treasures contained within this museum complex are impossible to enumerate but mention should be made of the fact that the tower is colonized by swifts, a pioneering study of which was published by the zoologist David Lack in 1956.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0