History of Science Museum
Einstein's blackboard, a room full of astrolabes, and the oldest museum building on earth — free to walk into, on Broad Street.
Einstein's blackboard, a room full of astrolabes, and the oldest museum building on earth — free to walk into, on Broad Street.
This is one of our very favourite small museums anywhere, and one a lot of visitors to Oxford walk straight past. It lives in the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street, a beautiful stone building of 1683 that has the distinction of being the oldest purpose-built museum in the world, next to the Sheldonian. Inside, three floors are packed with some eighteen thousand objects charting the history of science from antiquity to the twentieth century, and for anyone with the faintest curiosity about how we came to understand the world, it is completely absorbing.
What makes it special is the density and beauty of the things themselves. There is the finest collection of astrolabes anywhere on earth, some hundred and seventy of them, alongside gilded sundials, early globes, microscopes and telescopes, and cabinet after cabinet of instruments made as much for beauty as for use. Tucked among them are objects that stop you in your tracks: the blackboard Albert Einstein wrote on during a lecture in Oxford in 1931, still chalked with his equations; early wireless apparatus built by Marconi; and a sample connected to the first use of penicillin, developed here in Oxford. It is small enough to see properly in an hour or two, and rich enough that you could come back a dozen times.
Best of all, it is free to enter, like Oxford's other university museums, so you can drop in for half an hour or lose a whole afternoon at no cost. It is open most days, though it tends to keep slightly shorter hours than a big national museum and can close on a Monday, so it is worth a quick check of the current days and times on the museum's own site before you set out. It is right in the centre of the city on Broad Street, so it pairs with almost anything else you do in Oxford.
Broad Street is one of the best few hundred yards in Oxford, so the museum slots into a full day with ease. Blackwell’s is a couple of doors along, the Bodleian and Sheldonian are right there, and the Ashmolean is a short stroll for a bigger, broader collection. If the science bug bites, the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers are a walk across town. And when you have earned a sit-down, the rooftop bar at The Store is on the same street. Our full guide to things to do gathers the rest.
“It's tiny, it's free, and it's one of the most wonderful rooms in Oxford. Standing in front of the blackboard Einstein actually wrote on, in the oldest museum on earth, gets us every time.”
A day in Oxford, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.