Ashmolean Museum

Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean Museum is the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology. Its extensive collections range from Egyptian mummies and classical sculptures to Pre-Raphaelite paintings and modern art, offering insights into human history and culture across time and geography. Admission is free, and the museum provides various services, including exhibitions, workshops, family activities, audio guides, and a rooftop restaurant and terrace. The museum is located at Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2PH, United Kingdom.

Planning your visit

The Ashmolean has a decent claim to being the first public museum in the world — founded in 1683 when Elias Ashmole gave his cabinet of curiosities to Oxford University, on condition that a building be constructed to hold it and that the public be admitted. The current collection ranges enormously: Egyptian mummies, Minoan and classical antiquities, the Alfred Jewel from ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England, Chinese and Islamic art, Old Master drawings including Michelangelo and Raphael, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and Powhatan's Mantle, brought from Virginia in the seventeenth century.

Rick Mather's 2009 rebuilding reorganised the museum around the theme of Crossing Cultures, arranging galleries so that connections between civilisations run through the building rather than separating them by region. Admission is free.

Oxford's compact centre makes this easy to combine with the colleges and the Bodleian, and the rooftop restaurant terrace gives a view over the city's spires that few visitors find.

Bookable options are guided tours rather than tickets. Formats include tours led by art historians covering the collection's highlights, and tours run by Uncomfortable Oxford, which examine the collection's colonial provenance and the university's historical entanglements — a genuinely different and more critical reading of the same objects. Current availability is listed below.