Museums and collections

The Ashmolean is the world’s oldest public museum and the most important museum of art and archaeology in this country outside London, as well as being the greatest university museum in the world. It has a strong collection of European graphic art, with drawings by Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael.

Following a major redevelopment, the Ashmolean Museum now offers 39 new galleries, a purpose-built Education Centre, and three new study centres with hands-on access to reserve collections.

Students of Ancient History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, Classics or History of Art will certainly use the Museum.

The spectacular neo-Gothic architecture of a Grade I listed building houses the University’s zoological, entomological and geological specimens. Among its famous features are a dodo, the first dinosaur to be scientifically identified, and the swifts in the tower. The Archaeology, Biology and Earth Sciences courses make use of the staff expertise and collections at the OUMNH.

The Pitt Rivers is a museum of ethnography and world archaeology, celebrated for its period feel and the density of its displays. Courses that use the museum’s resources include Human Sciences, Archaeology and Anthropology, Geography, Classics, History of Art and Fine Art. Recent redevelopment at the Museum has added fresh research and teaching facilities for students and academics, and reinstated the original entrance to the Museum. It takes its name and founding collection from General Pitt Rivers, the distinguished collector and scholar.

The world’s oldest purpose-built museum building houses an unrivalled collection of 25,000 scientific instruments, from antiquity to the 20th century, especially astrolabes, sundials, quadrants, mathematical and optical instruments, and apparatus associated with chemistry, natural philosophy and medicine. The staff teach History of Science courses. For more information please see the MHS website.

The Botanic Garden acts as a reference collection of 6,000 types of plant: it is the most compact yet diverse collection of plants in the world, and the oldest such garden in Britain. Plants grown here support teaching and research, in the University and elsewhere, and the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. The 130 acre Harcourt Arboretum is also part of the Botanic Garden and is the site of a new wildflower meadow restoration project. The Garden contributes to the Biological Sciences and Medicine courses.

The Bate Collection is one of the most magnificent collections of musical instruments in the world. The Bate has more than 2,000 instruments from the renaissance, through the baroque, classical and romantic periods up to modern times. More than a thousand instruments are on display, by all the most important makers and from pre-eminent collectors. Music and History of Art undergraduates make use of the collection.