Oxford's revamped Ashmolean can now "do drama"

By Eleanor McCausland

OXFORD, England (Reuters Life!) - T.E. Lawrence's Arab dress, an entire Japanese tea house and the best Aegean history collection outside Greece will be star exhibits when Britain's oldest public museum re-opens on Saturday.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will swing wide its doors after a multimillion pound renovation, which has seen the museum closed to the public for the last 10 months.

The refurbished Ashmolean comprises 39 new galleries, including four temporary exhibition galleries, a new education center and state-of-the art conservation studios.

The building, designed by award-winning Rick Mather Architects, not only doubled the Ashmolean's display space, but also offered the opportunity to completely redesign the presentation of the museum's artifacts.

"From the outset, our ambition has been to create not just an improved and expanded version of Britain's oldest public museum, but something significantly different in kind: a new way of showcasing the Ashmolean's remarkable collections, for the benefit of the widest possible audience," Christopher Brown, Director of the Ashmolean told Reuters.

The Ashmolean has called its display strategy "Crossing Cultures Crossing Time," and says it is based on the idea that the civilizations which shaped our modern societies developed as part of an interrelated world culture, rather than in isolation.

Thematic galleries connect activities and objects common to different cultures, such as money, reading and writing, and the representation of the human image.

Project Director Henry Kim said that strange things used to happen when navigating the old museum.

"You'd go through Egypt and end up in Worcester Porcelain, which was just absolutely absurd," he said.

"Now we've gone back to this idea of studying objects cross-culturally, where you join cultures that actually have meaning next to each other; the Islamic world next to the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean next to India. You can take collections and make them talk to one another."

The museum's galleries are designed to facilitate this cross-cultural perspective. The use of both single- and double-height galleries and large glass showcases allows visitors to look through one gallery to another.

"Now the quality of the architecture finally matches the quality of the collections," Kim said.

The Ashmolean was originally based on the idiosyncratic collection of natural history specimens collected by gardening pioneers John Tradescant (father and son), which were donated to the antiquarian Elias Ashmole in 1659 and given to the University of Oxford by Ashmole in 1677.

It officially opened in 1683. Some of its earliest artifacts are on display in the 'Ark to Ashmolean' gallery, including a lantern used by Guy Fawkes who plotted to blow up England's Parliament in 1605 and a hawking glove of Henry VIII's.

Today, the Ashmolean remains dedicated to making its collections available to the widest possible audience.