Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford)

The Pitt Rivers Museum is a treasure chest of the weird and wonderful and should be a compulsory must-see place for every tourist visiting Oxford but sadly, it rarely is. Consequently those of us who know and love this quirky little museum are sometimes torn between the desire to sell its joys to the world and to keep it as our own special little secret. But on this occasion I'll take the risk of the place filling up and tell you about it.
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...OUMNH and it's gorgeous. The Pitt Rivers is like an untidy cupboard hiding on the back of it's big sister museum.

I have to confess that despite studying in a building right next door to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and taking lectures regularly in the building itself, even I didn't venture into the Pitt Rivers during my four years as a student. I don't think I had even heard of the place. So when I finally did ... more

The Pitt Rivers Museum is a treasure chest of the weird and wonderful and should be a compulsory must-see place for every tourist visiting Oxford but sadly, it rarely is. Consequently those of us who know and love this quirky little museum are sometimes torn between the desire to sell its joys to the world and to keep it as our own special little secret. But on this occasion I'll take the risk of the place filling up and tell you about it.

The Pitt Rivers is a place you need to know exists in order to find it. It's not widely publicised and you won't see it from the street because it's tucked away at the back of its sister museum, the much grander and more blousy Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Take a look at the photo Ciao have used. That's the OUMNH and it's gorgeous. The Pitt Rivers is like an untidy cupboard hiding on the back of it's big sister museum.

I have to confess that despite studying in a building right next door to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and taking lectures regularly in the building itself, even I didn't venture into the Pitt Rivers during my four years as a student. I don't think I had even heard of the place. So when I finally did go in, I was bowled over by what I found.

A True Eccentric of the Finest Kind

Lieutenant General Pitt Rivers was a true Victorian eccentric and a man with a voracious appetite for collecting. He didn't focus on specific areas or specialise in particular countries. Pitt Rivers collected just about anything and everything under a very broad umbrella of 'Ethnography'. He travelled around the world and, a bit like me on my holidays, filled his luggage with all manner or weird stuff, brought it back to the UK and then - probably when his house was ready to burst at the seams, he endowed his collection to Oxford University on the condition that they had to build a home for it and had to appoint a lecturer in anthropology. From his original bequest of 18,000 items, the collection has expanded and today contains more than half a million pieces. To think that I thought I had a problem with my husband's studio pottery obsession filling our house.

Ooh, he's got an 'ology'

What makes the Pitt Rivers Museum so different from most is the way it displays its items. Most museums would put together all the exhibits from a particular country in one place, and all those from another in a different section. Or they might put everything from a particular historic period in one section. What the Pitt Rivers does is display items according to what they are - not who made them or where they came from. So all the woven baskets go together depending on what they're used for. All the musical instruments are shown beside each other, jewellery is grouped together without regard for whether it's fancy precious metals from Europe or feathers from the South Pacific or shells from native Americans. In doing this, the exhibition shows how people many thousands of miles apart, sometimes divided by many centuries all worked out different - or sometimes very similar - ways to solve the same problems. It's like the story that went around in my childhood about all the blue tits in the UK working out how to break the foils on the top of milk bottles - give enough people (or birds) the same problem and they'll often derive very similar ways of solving it. I love it!

The Tricky Issue of the Heads

There are some very controversial exhibits, not least the so-called shrunken heads from Ecuador and Peru. Decades of debate has surrounded whether it's right and proper to exhibit human remains of this type. These particular artefacts were created by putting hot sand into the skins taken off the skulls of captured foes, resulting in them shrinking like a crisp packet over a candle flame.

A Gem at Every Turn

One of my personal favourites is the 'Witch in a bottle' - a small glass bottle with a label on it warning people not to open it because there's a witch inside. Priceless! And who's to say that there isn't a witch inside - even if it's empty you could argue that there had been before you let her out.

There's something quite magical about the layout of the museum and the subdued lighting which, combined with the bizarre way that things are displayed means you never quite know what you might find round the next corner. There's a fantastic free audio tour available which guides you through some of the famous or noteworthy exhibits but even with the map provided, it's easy to miss a few.

The museum building has a large high central hall with cast iron balconies suspended around the outside of the room on two higher levels. Look upwards and you'll see that the vertical space is used as well as the horizontal, with a tall totem pole reaching up to the roof and several boats suspended in the roof space.

Now with added 'stuff'

The museum has recently built an extension to enable more of the collection to be exhibited and was closed for a while during the remodelling. It reopened in Sprin and I haven't been back yet but my husband dropped in a few months back and said they'd done a good job and not destroyed the essential eccentricity of the place.

Don't just take my word for it that the Pitt Rivers is something special - the list of Patrons at the museum is very impressive and includes Sir David Attenborough, Michael Palin and writer Philip Pullman, who I believe (though I've not read his books) has used the Pitt Rivers in some of his books.

The Details

The museum is open daily until 4.30pm. It opens at 10 most days except Mondays when it opens at noon. There's no car parking available so probably best to park out of town in the Park and Ride and walk out from the centre along Parks Road, oggling a few colleges along the way. Anyone with limited mobility can download a guide to getting the most out of their visit. 

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