Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Join and leave the circuits as you please. Be escorted by local experts who are on hand to meet you throughout the day. Use the app to track your nearest guide and begin to discover countless visitor hotspots, including the University of Oxford, Radcliffe Camera, Carfax Tower, and Oxford Castle. Enjoy fascinating storytelling from your guide as you immerse yourself in Oxford’s quaint and charming streets. Best-known for housing one of the world’s most prestigious universities, the city also has exciting stories to tell surrounding history and literature, with plenty of visitor attractions to explore. Hop off your guided tour and self-guide whenever you wish. Benefit from multilingual audio commentary and recommended walking itineraries, pinpointing your favorite sights. Discover photo hotspots, all offline, day or night. When you're ready, hop back on a guided tour, and continue your sightseeing adventure.

Dissect the fascinating and uncomfortable history of health and medicine in the city of Oxford. Beginning in the mediaeval heart of Oxford, we walk participants through the history of health and medical research in the city. Both uncomfortable and fascinating, this tour asks questions about the lasting impact of disease and the way in which imperialism, conflict, and inequality have helped shape the development of modern medicine. Our tours are designed to be critically engaging activities that create discussion amongst participants and challenge them to analyse the diverse impacts of historical events. Using the built environment, we examine health geographies, resistance to public health policies, and the tensions inherent in medical progress. The tour is run by students from the University of Oxford and lasts for 1h45m. The group will walk no more than two miles, but please be aware that cobble stones and uneven pavement may restrict the accessibility of this event.

The Oxford and Empire Walking Tour focuses on the University as an institution that produced knowledge, qualifications, and networks, which found their more durable expression on a global scale. ‘Oxford and Empire’ starts at the Natural History Museum, highlighting the close links between the development of knowledge about the natural world and the early explorations voyages, the start of a documentation of the natural world on European terms. This rise of the sciences within the University courses coincided with the development and rise of the high imperial period in Britain. The Great Evolution Debate took place at the Natural History Museum, and its legacy loomed large with the creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum in a back building shortly after, to host the university’s anthropological collections in a typography which reflected fast developing social Darwinists’ beliefs in a hierarchy of civilisations. The tour thereafter takes us to the Rhodes house, interrogating the origins and legacies of a scholarship made of white men from the colonies, and further questions the imperial origins of a series of faculties in Oxford, such as Geography, Plant Science, and International Development. Ultimately, it is a tour that aims to highlight the complex and reciprocal relationship between Oxford and the Empire, and how it endures through the University's global appeal to this day.