26th May Oxford - History of Science, Blackwells Books and Pizza

Trevor and I had breakfast at the Tick Tock cafe near where we were staying , before heading on in to town to meet up with the others.

It was great to just arrive and be lazy together.
Eventually we pulled together a plan of sorts for the day and headed off to see some essentials of Oxford.

The first stop was Blackwells Books.  Blackwells is an institution in Oxford, having started in 1879 with a 12 foot square space. It has slowly increased its footprint and its reputation with institutions across the world,  and now surrounds the White horse Inn on three sides, taking up a considerable size area held together in a rabbit warren of rooms over various levels of shop and various specialities.

In 1966 the Norrington room was created. You enter what looks like a small shop on Broad street and work your way towards the back corner.   When you find the Norrington room you gasp in amazement. This room is HUGE!!!  It contains two and a half miles of book shelf and over 160,000 books. At the time of building it was the largest bespoke built bookroom in the world. It was built in partnership with Trinity College, who were excavating at the time.  The room was called the Norrington room after the President of Trinity at the time.

What a pleasure to see it and to browse in it.  A few more weeks to browse it it would not go astray.

Author talk in progress

looking across the room

 Next stop was the History of Science Museum, where we enjoyed marvelling at such things as Einstein's blackboard  (notes preserved on a blackboard from his visiting lecture on the expansion of the universe  in May 1939)

We saw lots of amazing metal instruments for measuring and studying the planets and time, and for navigating.

This is one of only two surviving examples of an equatorium in the world.

A chinese fire clock.  Threads are slowly burnt, allowing bronze balls to drop - which marks the passing of time. 

a fairly unimpressive entrance to a very interesting place. 

 Then we moved on to the Weston Library, where we first visited the small exhibition about the stone heads at the Sheldonian theatre.  The thirteen stone heads (seen below) stand on pillars facing the street and have been replaced twice due to erosion. They were first commissioned by Christopher Wren in the 1600s, and are thought to represent Roman emperors.  Oxford are currently searching for the old ones which were replaced, as no record was kept of them.  They have some photos of found ones - which look very sad and sorry for themselves parked in yards and woodland around the place.  Some are almost unrecognisable as heads at all.  The most recent replacement work was done in 1972 after two years of work by sculptor Michael Black.

The Weston also had an exhibition about 3D representation , showing how various artists have tried to represent 3D over the years . This included some amazing multi layer depictions of the human body, some 3D shapes made from folded paper which pop up out the pages of books, and also some original drawings by Leonardo himself! 

Also not to be missed at the Weston is their display of the Sheldon tapestry which has been preserved (well, parts of it have). This amazing 4 map series was commissioned  in the 1590s and shows maps of  Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire woven in wool and silk. 

This one has lost parts to moths, but is really beautiful and quite remarkable. It is not only a beautiful weaving but shows the stage of Cartography that was occuring at the time also.  It still covers a large portion of wall despite the bits missing. Each was about 6m x4m in size originally. 

By the time we had seen all these amazing things we were very tired, so we took ourselves home to Thom and Laura's place again and nestled in to eat delicious pizza and chat until bedtime (slightly earlier than the previous night) while continuing to drink many cups of tea.