What's so great about Oxford ?

Oxford for all the apparent romance of this center for learning isn't really a very nice place. It's full of cars, rusty bicycles and worst of all students. But all is not lost, it has some redeeming features, the fabulous Blackwells Bookstore an excellent Sushi train and two very special museums.

The first is the Natural History Museum - it's taken me three visits over 3 years to understand what's so special about this place. It's not the biggest natural history museum I've been in, it's not the smartest either, most of the collection here is simply presented in identical wooden framed glass cases about 12 feet high and 12 feet wide. What is special is that by just walking around balcony of geological and fossil specimens, by walking up and down the rows of glass cabinets filled with stuffed specimens and dinosaur skeletons you journey through the entire natural history timeline of our world much like speed reading Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' but with much better pictures.





The second is the Museum of the History of Science - 3 floors of working scientific instruments carefully organized again into large wooden framed glass cabinets. One of the earliest flasks of Penicillin, Marconi's experiments with radio waves and electricity and so on and so on, it's all the instruments used to conduct all the experiments you (ok perhaps mostly me) read about as a child, in school science through university physics and chemistry. It's not pretentious, a cabinet might contain 100 microscopes, but only the most eye catching or historically significant two or three will even be given a label. It's beautiful and inspiring without being overwhelming.