A few weeks ago my parents were in London visiting me and Ryan. We did a ton of touristy stuff. We went to Borough Market, the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. We went out to eat, went to the cinema, and hung out. We also did some things I’d never done before like visit Oxford. My parents had been there before but through Ryan and I would love it. There’s lots of stuff to do there but let me tell you about a few highlights. Spoiler: they are mainly Harry Potter and museum related.
First, we went to the Great Hall at Christ Church College at Oxford University. Whew, that’s a mouthful and I’m not sure I even have the name correctly.This gorgeous hall was the inspiration for the Great Hall at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Also, the stairway outside the hall was used in the first Harry Potter movie when the students were received by Professor McGonagall. The space is lovely and I think it is pretty cool that students still use it for meals. The room is dark and wood paneled with high vaulted ceilings and lots of portraits on the wall. The sheer number of portraits on the wall reminded me of the corridors in Harry Potter. My favorite portraits in the hall were of Henry VIII and William Penn.
Outside the hall is a door with the graffiti “no peel” written in nails hammered into the wooden door. This graffiti dates from the 17th century. There are lots of myths about the motives behind the graffiti, but the real reason is that it was done in protest of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Apparently it was because it was about his changing views on religious reformation. Mostly I like that they kept graffiti around for so long. Nowadays that stuff would get cleaned up pretty quickly I bet.
Generally though the buildings and land around Oxford are beautiful and ornate. It’s a nice place, and I’m sure as a student it must feel awesome to be a part of a long and illustrious history. However, I felt like it was sort of quiet insular place and didn’t have the excitement and bustle that I like about college campuses. But still, I think the opportunity to use and live in a space so beautiful and historic would be awesome. So often places that look like Oxford used to be used but are now just for looking at. I think it’s sort of refreshing that here the places are still active and alive.
After the Great Hall we went to the Cathedral. Again there was some beautiful architecture. The ceiling was pretty cool. It looked like a snowflake or an interlocking web of arches and ribs. What I enjoyed best was the stained glass. You can see an image of one large window in the bottom left picture below. You can also see my parents in the foreground looking at a tomb.
In that window above at the very top is a beautiful stained glass ship. I liked that a lot because it’s an unusual thing to see in a church window. In the photo below is another interesting window showing the beheading of Thomas Becket (center of photo). According to another blog about this window, I found out that Becket doesn’t have a face because Henry VIII found it too graphic. Apparently a plain piece of glass was used to censor it a bit.
After visiting these two places in Christ Church we walked around Oxford a bit more and then found our way over to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I love natural history museums because I think they have such wow factor. It’s so amazing to see things I’m familiar with but never seen up close. I also like getting to see things I’ve never known about before. Also, I love seeing dinosaurs because they are just awesome.
There was a big exhibit on insects which my family loved but which gave me a bit of the heebie-jeebies. I got a little nervous by seeing the big hairy tarantulas. One of the things I loved the most was the scale model of the earth moon and sun. In the photo on the left, below, you can see my parents all the way across the museum waving. My father is the one on the right and you can kind of see a golden ball in front of him. This represents the sun and it was about the size of a basketball. Now, the photo below on the right was all the way across the room from my parents (so where I was standing when taking their picture). And this model shows the size of the Earth and Moon. So they are to scale in both size and distance relative to the sun. I knew the sun was big and far away but holy moly! We are tiny and peanut sized and I loved seeing it.
I also love natural history museums for the animals. We saw a gigantic taxidermied crab. I’m not sure crabs can be taxidermied, but it was a crab formerly alive but now in a case. It was gigantic, and about as big as me! I also love seeing animal skeletons. I liked seeing how they are similar, how they are different, and also how bodies can be unexpected. For example they had an elephant skeleton and it’s so crazy to see an elephant without a trunk.
Also inside the museum is the Pitt Rivers Museum. I love this museum because it is so quirky and full of fascinating objects. Accessed through the Natural History Museum the Pitt Rivers Museum was founded in 1884 by Lieutenant General Augustus Pitt Rivers who donated his collection to Oxford. It’s such a traditional cabinet of curiosity style of exhibit display which is fun any unusual today. Meaning, instead of displaying just a few things in a minimalist and orderly fashioned, a cabinet of curiosities has lots of things packed closely together. I enjoyed that style. I liked walking into the room and seeing it jammed full of objects. It’s like being in a museum while simultaneously being in an antique shop. You just never know what you’ll find.
The objects in the museum are arranged thematically rather than chronologically which I think is delightful and sometimes a bit random. So there are cases about religious objects, about musical instruments, and cases about writing. I saw a totem pole, a shrunken head, and a pipe. As I walked around it was fun, and surprising, to turn around and be face to face with all kinds of objects. I loved the small gorgeously handwritten object labels. And I loved the surprising collection of objects. The photo above in the bottom left is an ivory ball of many layers all carved from one piece of ivory. Amazing right?
Overall, I had a lovely day out with my family in Oxford. There are a number of things to see and it’s a nice place to stroll around and stop at the places that catch your fancy. I loved seeing the history at the University, I was charmed by the Harry Potter connections, and I really had fun at the Natural History Museum. It’s just a quick train ride outside of London so I recommend considering it if you want to get out of the city for the day!
