Oxford University Museum of Natural History
A free museum under a soaring neo-Gothic glass roof, with the Pitt Rivers just behind it.
A free museum under a soaring neo-Gothic glass roof, with the Pitt Rivers just behind it.
This is our go-to when we want to give the children a proper Oxford day out without the fuss of tickets or timings. You step through the doors on Parks Road, look up, and the building itself nearly upstages everything inside it. Iron columns carved to look like tree trunks hold up an extraordinary glass canopy, and the whole central court fills with soft, even light. It feels less like a museum and more like a Victorian cathedral built in honour of the natural world. That it is free, and open every day, means we never have to plan it far in advance. If the morning turns grey and we want somewhere the children can roam, this is the first place we think of.
The collection is wonderful and wonderfully eclectic. There are dinosaur skeletons that stop children (and, honestly, adults) mid-stride, a famous dodo, minerals arranged in glowing cabinets, and Oxford's own slice of scientific history woven through every gallery. In summer a colony of swifts nests in the tower above, watched over by one of the longest-running studies of its kind. Because there is no admission charge, we treat it lightly: some visits we stay twenty minutes and chase the dinosaurs, others we lose a whole rainy afternoon and never make it past the first gallery.
The clever part is that you get two very different museums for the price of none. Once you have had your fill of the light-filled main court, you walk straight through the back of it into the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the change of mood is wonderful. Where the natural history galleries are open and airy, the Pitt Rivers is dim and densely packed, its cases stacked floor to ceiling with anthropological curiosities grouped by what they do rather than where they came from. Our children love hunting for the shrunken heads and the tiny objects tucked into corners. Together the two make an easy half-day under a single roof, which is exactly what you want with younger ones in tow. Read more about the Pitt Rivers Museum, or plan a fuller day in Oxford.
The museum sits on Parks Road in the heart of the university quarter, a short walk from the Bodleian and the covered market. From Well Cottage it is around thirty-five to forty minutes by car, but the last stretch into central Oxford is the fiddly part. We almost always use one of the park-and-ride sites on the edge of the city and take the bus in, which drops the stress and the parking bills at once. Entry is free and not ticketed, so there is nothing to book and no wrong time to arrive; we tend to go earlier in the day and pair it with lunch and a wander through the colleges. Larger groups do need to arrange their visit in advance, but for a family it is as simple as walking through the door.
“The roof is the real exhibit. Our children always head straight for the dinosaurs, but I spend half my time just looking up.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.