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Pitt Rivers Museum

ANDREW McLELLAN describes the way in which objects are displayed in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford

It was a warm evening in early summer. Sitting in the upstairs bar at Paddington Station, the train to Oxford delayed again, there was just time for another pint to wash down the London air. Soon we were on the train and then out, beyond the London suburbs, looking at the rolling green countryside flashing by.

We were staying at the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford High Street, time for a quick dinner and then a night walk around Oxford, along Catte Street, past the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian. These and other buildings, all with their night lighting, transporting us back through the centuries of learning, all as beautiful as it ever was.

The purpose of this particular visit to Oxford was to explore the Pitt Rivers Museum collection. As a child in Britain it was its museums and galleries that taught me about the world and encouraged in me a great urge to go and explore it. I have never lost my enthusiasm for these institutions and we visit them whenever we can. So we set off from the hotel the next morning eager to revisit the museum’s collection.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum of ethnography and world archaeology and one of several museums belonging to the University of Oxford. As a department of the University of Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum is used by staff and students for teaching and research. The Museum is also open to the public and is a great resource for school students, a resource that allows detailed investigations of objects and cultures and one which provides an insight into the resourcefulness of human societies around the world. Sometimes the similarity of solutions to problems from societies who would not have been directly in touch with each other is startling.

Those who know the Pitt Rivers Museum well, carry with them a great fondness for the Museum and its collection. In 2007 the Museum completed a major new extension which includes a special exhibitions gallery that accommodates curated exhibitions of the Museum’s reserve objects and photographic collection. In 2009 the entrance to the Museum (which adjoins the Oxford University Museum of Natural History) was redesigned. Reopening the Museum in May 2009, DAVID ATTENBOROUGH had this to say about the Pitt Rivers Museum.

“What it does, the Museum, is to put the objects first. So that you look at the objects….. this is a virtually unique way of ordering and displaying ethnographic objects. I suggest to you a little game. What you might like to do is to go to one of these cases and not look at the label. Just look at the objects and try and work out what on earth all those objects have in common….. A Museum that is unique in the world, that has treasures stemming from Captain Cook to objects that were collected a year or so ago. It’s a remarkable institution. Some might say, those of us who are connoisseurs of museums, that it holds a very, very special place in our affections. But it will also hold a place in the heart of anybody who comes in from the street and suddenly sees this, a nonpareil if ever there was one, a unique museum now available to all”.

In describing the differences the Museum delivers to those who go there, SIR DAVID put his finger on the essence, the intangible mark, left on its visitors by the Museum and its displays and collections.

To find out more about the Pitt Rivers Museum I spoke to ANDREW McLELLAN, the Museum’s Education Officer. ANDREW provides an astute insight into the history and philosophy of the Museum.

Oxford in early Summer