Ashmolean Museum

Stand for a moment at the foot of the steps on Beaumont Street. The stone under your feet is worn smooth, and above you a row of tall Greek columns holds up a heavy, carved front. Buses hum past behind you. Bicycles tick by. And across the road, the Randolph Hotel looks back with its Gothic windows. Two architectural ideas face each other here, one Greek and one medieval. You are about to walk into the older idea, and into a much older story.

The Ashmolean is Britain's first public museum. It opened in 1683, and it is often described as the first university museum in the world. That matters more than it sounds. Before this, great collections usually belonged to kings, nobles, or private gentlemen. You saw them only if you were invited. Here, for the first time in Britain, an institution opened its doors to curious visitors. The idea that a museum belongs to the public started, in part, right here in Oxford.

The museum carries the name of Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century antiquary, lawyer, and keen student of astrology and alchemy. But here is the first surprise. Much of his famous gift was not collected by him at all. It came from John Tradescant and his son, two gardeners and plant hunters. In their house in Lambeth, in London, they filled rooms with shells, carvings, coins, weapons, and strange animals. Visitors called it the Ark. After the younger Tradescant died, the collection passed to Ashmole, and then to Oxford.

The story of that transfer is not entirely comfortable. The Tradescant family and Ashmole fell into a bitter legal dispute over the collection. Ashmole won. Today, historians often point out that the Tradescants deserve much of the credit. So as you walk through these rooms, keep the gardeners in mind. Some of the earliest objects in this museum were gathered by people who worked with soil and seeds, not by scholars in libraries.

The first museum building was not here. It stood on Broad Street, a short walk east of where you are now. That older building still exists. Today it houses Oxford's History of Science Museum. The Ashmolean moved to this site in the middle of the nineteenth century. The architect was Charles Robert Cockerell, who loved ancient Greek design. That is why the front looks like a temple. The same building also holds the Taylor Institution, the university's centre for modern European languages.

Now step inside, and notice how the light changes. The old classical rooms are only part of the picture. In 2009, the museum reopened after a major rebuilding by Rick Mather Architects. Behind the historic front, a bright modern interior rises through several floors. White walls, open stairwells, and long views connect the galleries. The design follows a simple idea called Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time. Instead of keeping each civilisation in its own sealed box, the galleries show how people, goods, and ideas travelled between them.

One of the most loved objects here is small enough to hold in your hand. It is the Alfred Jewel, made in Anglo-Saxon England more than a thousand years ago. It has gold work around a piece of rock crystal, with an enamel figure underneath. Around the edge, Old English letters say, in translation, that Alfred ordered me to be made. Most scholars connect it with King Alfred the Great. Nobody knows for certain what it was used for. One popular idea is that it was the handle of a pointer for following lines of text while reading.

Here is another surprise. Among the paintings and statues, the museum keeps one of the most famous violins in the world. It is known as the Messiah, made by Antonio Stradivari, the great Italian violin maker. It is famous partly because it looks almost new. It has hardly been played. So it shows, more clearly than most instruments, how a Stradivarius looked when it left the workshop. Look closely at the varnish and the curl of the scroll at the top.

The Egyptian galleries are worth a slow walk. One of their largest pieces is a shrine of King Taharqa, a ruler from Kush, in what is now Sudan, who also ruled Egypt. This small stone temple was brought from the site of Kawa and rebuilt inside the museum. You can walk around it and see carved figures of the king and gods. It is a reminder that Egyptian history was shaped by powers from the south, not only by kings along the Nile delta.

The museum also has a strong link to ancient Crete. Arthur Evans, the archaeologist famous for his work at Knossos, was once keeper of the Ashmolean. Because of that connection, the museum holds important material from the Minoan world, the Bronze Age culture of Crete. Look for painted pottery, small seals, and fragments that show the bright, flowing style of that civilisation. Much of what the public imagines about the Minoans was shaped by Evans, and by objects that passed through these rooms.

Upstairs, the painting galleries move from Renaissance Italy to the nineteenth century and beyond. A favourite is The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello. In a dark wood, riders, dogs, and deer run toward a single vanishing point deep in the trees. It is an early study in perspective, the technique of showing depth on a flat surface. Nearby, look for works by the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of Victorian artists who loved bright colour and sharp detail. The museum also keeps a large collection of drawings, including works by Raphael and Michelangelo.

A quieter surprise waits below ground level. The Cast Gallery holds plaster copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. These copies were made so students could study famous statues without travelling across Europe. Walking among them feels like entering a crowded hall of pale white figures. Some original statues are damaged or scattered between museums, so these casts let you see them side by side. Many visitors miss this room completely. It is worth finding.

One more story, and this one sits between history and legend. The Tradescant collection once included a stuffed dodo, the flightless bird from Mauritius that became extinct. According to a popular account, the decaying specimen was thrown out in the eighteenth century, and only parts were saved. Those remains are now cared for at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, not here. But the dodo began its Oxford life as part of this museum's founding gift.

When you walk back out between the columns, pause on the top step. Look down Beaumont Street and over toward the old stone colleges. You have just moved through thousands of years in a single afternoon, from Egyptian kings to Victorian painters. And it all started with a gardener's cabinet of curiosities. Listen to the traffic and the bicycle bells. Ordinary Oxford life continues outside, just as it did when the first visitors came here to look.