The University Museum And Pitt Rivers Museum

This exceptional museum complex comprises the University Museum, built 1855-60 to designs by Sir Thomas Deane (1792-1871) and Benjamin Woodward (1816-1861), with the Pitt Rivers Museum of 1885-6 by T N Deane & Son abutting to the rear.

The University Museum

The University Museum is constructed principally of Bath (Box Ground) stone with detailing in red Bristol sandstone and Hornton ironstone. The tower cornice is in Irish mountain limestone, while the porch arch incorporates red Irish limestone, green marlstone from Hornton, and white Italian marble, with Portland stone slabs in the spandrels. The arcade has Caen stone bases and capitals. Other materials include cast iron, slates, and 12-inch by 12-inch glass slates.

The main façade, reminiscent of a Flemish cloth hall, runs north-south and faces west. Built in smooth buff ashlar with some banded detailing in reddish-brown ashlar, it rises two storeys with triangular dormers and ventilators piercing the grey-green slate roof. At the centre stands a tall three-storey tower with a steeply pitched hipped roof, its base containing the main entrance door. The doorway and the six bays of windows along the façade to either side (the first-floor windows being more complex and regularly spaced than those below) are designed in an interpretation of the Early English style. About a third of the windows and the door surround are richly carved with naturalistic detail executed by the Irish O'Shea brothers and their nephew Edward Whellan, who were dismissed before completing their work. Set back behind both rear corners of the façade are angular stair turrets with tall conical roofs. The side wings of the building form, together with the façade, three sides of the spectacular glazed hall which houses most of the main exhibits.

The double-volume glazed court measures 110 feet by 110 feet and is divided into five bays by iron columns supporting an arched roof in an A:B:A:B:A rhythm, with the wide central bay being taller than those to either side. The court is surrounded by a two-storey brick-and-stone arcade which provides circulation. Throughout the University Museum, and especially in its public spaces, the carved decoration (some again by the O'Sheas, the remainder completed by 1910), the incorporation of geological specimens, and most notably the innovative and highly ornamental cast ironwork of the glazed hall (by F A Skidmore of Coventry) form exhibits in their own right. The stone columns of the arcades, most with the type of stone and its source inscribed on the base, incorporate exhibit and structural component, while their capitals, carved with thistles, daisies, ivy and honeysuckle, serve as an encyclopaedia of nature. Similarly, the slender cast-iron shafts have wrought iron capitals formed into leaves of palm, oak, chestnut and sycamore. Set against the columns supporting the ground-floor arcade are life-size statues of eminent scientists.

Set around the glazed court are what were originally rooms for professors and students, lecture rooms, a library, stores for collections, a dissecting room, and a porters' mess room. Some of these were originally double height and open to the roof (in these instances the roof trusses were generally given decorative treatment), although incrementally since the later 19th century these have generally been subdivided horizontally by inserted floors serviced by new staircases. Throughout these rooms there is much rich decorative work: carved and painted woodwork, painted walls and ceilings, door furniture, carved stone fireplaces, and cast iron grates. Of particular note is the upper part (now the Director's Office) of the former Geological Lecture Room with geologically themed gable-wall murals of 1859-60 by the Reverend Richard St John Tyrwhitt (1827-95), vicar of St Mary Magdalen's in Oxford and a friend of Ruskin.

The Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum is built of yellow brick with some red stone and has a slate roof. This large pitched-roof hall is windowless to the north, where the wall carries tall blind arcades and is pierced by a single gothic doorway. To the east it abuts the Human Anatomy building, while to the south the angle between it and the University Museum is infilled by the Pitt Rivers extension and a new staircase (neither included in the listing), both completed around 2007.

The interior is a gabled building of seven bays with a nave and an aisle to either side created by round cast iron piers with decorative trusses. Two galleries, at first- and second-floor level, run around the main open hall. Access to the galleries is via a staircase in the south-west corner of the building, while the hall itself is entered via a connecting door from the University Museum. At the front of the museum there is a shop and a display area inserted in the later 20th century; these areas are not of special interest.

Historical Context

The University Museum in Parks Road derives from an initiative of 1847 to create a science building and museum of natural history as finally the conservative university introduced natural science to the curriculum. A meeting in 1849 determined that the planned museum should house 'all the materials explanatory of the organic beings placed upon the globe'. The driving forces behind this movement were David Williams, Warden of New College, and Dr Henry Ackland, Professor of Clinical Medicine, the latter a friend of John Ruskin with whom he travelled with Millais to Scotland in 1853, the year when the final part of Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice' appeared. Ruskin's beliefs in the Gothic style—or rather the Italian Gothic one—and in the supreme influence of the workman's hand and of nature as a source of inspiration, probably influenced the selection of a design by Benjamin Woodward for the museum and its decorative treatment. A site was bought in 1854, and the building went up between 1855 and 1860. As architectural historian Howard Colvin has observed, this was what would today be called a centre for scientific studies and, besides a large area for displaying specimens, provided lecture rooms, laboratories, dissecting rooms and a library.

Attached to the south side of the original museum is the octagonal former Chemistry Laboratory, modelled on the Abbot's Kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey (separately listed). The arcaded link which connects the two dates from 1901. Behind the Chemistry Laboratory was the large curator's house, demolished in the 1950s.

In 1885-6 the Pitt Rivers Museum was added north-east of the museum to house the collections of the pioneer archaeologist and anthropologist General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, which he had given to the University in 1884. The gift was made on condition that a museum was built to house it and someone appointed to lecture on anthropology. The architect was T N Deane & Son. It was enlarged in 1907.

Together this forms one of the most significant and carefully detailed museum complexes of the mid to late 19th century, as well as being a seminal monument to Oxford's scientific awakening.