On Thursday afternoon the Year Eight Museum Council, and Sixth Form Museum Volunteers, set off on a journey to the Story Museum to discover some of the places in Oxford connected to well-known stories and authors. We were greeted at the Story Museum by Isy Mead who started by taking us to a passageway next to St Mary's Church, where she explained that C.S Lewis had been inspired on a very snowy day in the 1940s by looking up the passageway and seeing a lantern, and looking at a door with what looked like a lionesque carving.
We heard about how C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and other writers met regularly at the Eagle & Child pub on St Giles and called themselves the "inklings". They would discuss their ideas for books there. We looked at the rooftops of the colleges, and heard about Philip Pullman's Northern Lights where a girl called Lyra would explore the rooftops as well as the world underneath people's feet.
We looked at some new gargoyles carved for the Bodleian Library and saw how they each featured different stories or people connected to stories in Oxford. We then made our way to Magpie Lane, where we heard about the ghost of a woman waiting for her fiance to come back from the war. Locals report still seeing her walking back and forth!
We walked past the locked gate of Christ Church college garden, which inspired Lewis Carroll to imagine Alice trying to get into a locked garden in his Alice in Wonderland. We also walked past an underground canal in Christ Church meadow and heard how students used to punt down the underground channel, and their friends could check on them intermittently by lifting up manhole covers, but about eighty years ago, three students went down there, but never returned. Later, a boat with three skeletons was reported to have been seen sailing out of the bridge by the Oxford Mail.
We walked past Pembroke College, where J.R.R. Tolkien taught languages and heard about how his experiences of World War One inspired some of his ideas in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and how he invented his own languages and drew beautiful illustrations and maps for his works.
Finally, we returned to the Story Museum where we went into the Time Machine and watched a film exploring these and many other stories connected to the city of Oxford.
This fascinating trip kicks off an exciting new Museum Council project involving stories, The project itself is top secret except for those who are taking part, but all will be revealed on Wednesday 9th March! Thank you very much to Isy and the Story Museum team for a fantastical afternoon.
