Explore Oxford

Christ Church is a college of the University of Oxford founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, whose chapel is also the cathedral of the Oxford diocese. The visitor route leads through Tom Quad, the largest quadrangle in Oxford, beneath Christopher Wren's Tom Tower, to the Great Hall and the cathedral; the college buildings appear in the Harry Potter films.

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford, reopened by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602 in the room above the Divinity School, completed in 1488. Guided tours lead into Duke Humfrey's Library and the Divinity School of the Old Library, and the Weston Library on Broad Street holds exhibitions, the tour desk and a café.

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology belongs to the University of Oxford and grew from the collection Elias Ashmole gave the university in 1677. Its present building on Beaumont Street was built in 1841–45 and extended in 2009; the galleries range from Egyptian and Greek antiquities to European paintings and Asian art.

The Pitt Rivers Museum holds the University of Oxford's archaeological and anthropological collections. It began in 1884 with about 22,000 objects given by Augustus Pitt Rivers and now has more than 600,000. The galleries, built in 1885–1886 and entered through the Museum of Natural History, group objects by how they were used rather than by region or age.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History on Parks Road opened in 1860 in a neo-Gothic building by Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, shaped by the ideas of John Ruskin. Under a glass roof on cast-iron columns stand dinosaur skeletons and the remains of a dodo. In June 1860 it hosted the evolution debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.