Blog

Rumble Museum students and staff present Holocaust Candles project to the King at Buckingham Palace

On Monday 13th January, Cheney School students Amy Bedding (Year Eleven) and Nadia Heer (Year Eight) were invited to present their Holocaust Memorial candle holders project to the King at Buckingham Palace.

In October, students from Rumble Museum Council groups in Years Eight, Nine, Ten and Eleven took part in a project designed by Beth Jones from the Museum of Oxford, and funded by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust as part of their 80 Candles for 80 Years project.

The project involved Museum Council students from Cheney hearing the moving story of Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who survived Auschwitz by joining the Women’s Orchestra. The students discussed how museums can engage with and exhibit difficult histories, and they each then worked on decorating an individual candle-holder, thinking carefully about how their design might reflect the story and themes we had been discussing. While decorating, a piece of music by Karl Jenkins was played.

Nadia and Amy were able to talk about their designs for several minutes to the King, who met them, accompanied by Holocaust survivor, Manfred Goldberg, and asked them questions about their designs and their thoughts.

Amy explained how her candleholder was decorated with musical notes, alluding to Anita’s musicianship, and also broken glass, which symbolised her experience in Auschwitz. There are also human figures that show Anita’s community and orchestra, through which Amy said “she and others were able to join together and share a common human experience and keep hope alive in order to survive”.

Rumble Museum Founder and Director Dr Lorna Robinson and Museum Lead and History Teacher David Gimson accompanied the students to Buckingham Palace.

Festival of Birds, Tuesday 4th February, 3 - 5pm

We were delighted to hold a Festival of Birds at Cheney School on Tuesday 4th February, 3 - 5pm.

The event was the first of a series of events celebrating the nature around us, as we began an extended series of miniature events.

There were a range of bird-themed information and activity stalls, including scientific, artistic, craft and storytelling explorations and celebrations of the birds around us. There were also refreshments available and a live bird display.

Visitors were able to find out about the birds around us, and how they inspired ancient myths, stories, art and more through the ages. There were a number of local scientists and artists talking about how their work has been inspired by birds.

We also displayed prints of birds from magical realist, bird-themed novel The Birder, set in Oxford, and written by Rumble Museum director Lorna Robinson.

Vintage toys and games at Rumble Museum's Toys and Games Collection afternoon

A 1930s wooden train, an original set of scrabble, and a cash register with shillings and pence were some of the items which came through Cheney School's doors at the Rumble Museum's Collection afternoon yesterday.

The Museum of Oxford was there with a range of artefacts to display too, and Ms Gersh, data manager, brought some of the toys she had designed in an earlier career as a toy designer! We were also delighted to welcome Bernard Stone, an alumnus from the Cheney Technical School in the 1950s who brought an impressive array of objects. Students, staff and parents were able to explore artefacts and share their stories of childhood. BBC Radio Oxford were also there to speak to people about their experiences of childhood.

A community vote on favourite toys was also held, and lego came out as the winner!

All these stories and objects will slowly begin to be turned into a brand new exhibition about the History of Childhood, which will be displayed in converted old lockers.

The exhibition will be curated by our Museum Council students, with support from the Museum of Oxford, and will be launched later in 2025.

We are still very much open for any donations of toys, games and books from childhood - please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Oxford linocut prints in The Birder

St Giles' Cafe, Gloucester Green, Martyrs' Memorial, Cheney School, Lady Margaret Hall, C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve, and St Mary and St John Church are some of the well-known locations around the city which features in a new novel illustrated by handmade linocut prints featuring birds.

The new novel The Birder is set in a mysterious Oxford city where people transform instead of dying, and where an ancient poem by Ovid might hold the key to the mystery at the heart of this strange yet familiar universe.

Since witnessing her brother change into a blackbird at an early age, Merel has never felt quite at home in the world.

She embarks on a journey through science, religion, art and philosophy in her effort to come to terms with her loss. When she discovers a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her local library, she soon becomes convinced that her world was not meant to be this way, and that this book holds the secret for putting things back on track.

Illustrated with linocut prints of birds around the city of Oxford, The Birder creates a mysterious world that is filled with familiar sorrows and joys.

Dr Lorna Robinson is the founding director of the Iris Project, a charity which runs a range of classical initiatives in state schools and communities. She is also the founding director of the Rumble Museum at Cheney School, the first fully accredited museum as part of a school.

She has previously published a series of storybook courses Telling Tales in Latin: Parts 1 and 2, and Telling Tales in Greek. She has also published Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ovid: Magical and Monstrous Realities.

More recently, she embarked on a fiction project with illustrator Lydia Hall, which involved re-imagining Greek myths connected to plants. Together they published four small books in the series, Telling Tales in Nature: Underworld Tales, Forest Tales, Orchard Tales and Meadow Tales. These are now published as a compendium.

Lydia Hall is an illustrator and printmaker based in Glasgow. She has worked, both on personal projects and with schools and organisations, to create bold narrative based work. With an emphasis on collaboration, she seeks to use her practice to tell thoughtful and intriguing stories.

The book is available to purchase as hardback, paperback and ebook here.

Stories from Childhood: Your Favourite Toy

The Rumble Museum is running a Toys and Games Stories & Collection Afternoon on Tuesday 3rd December, from 3.30 to 5pm at Cheney School.

We are inviting members of the public to visit with any stories about their childhood toys and games, as well as items they would be happy to donate to our forthcoming exhibition on A History of Childhood. There will also be artefact-handling, refreshments and activities for all ages.

The exhibition will be curated by our Museum Council students, with support from the Museum of Oxford, and will be launched later in 2025. We are looking for toys and games of any kind and from any era, up to the present day. The exhibition will see lockers converted into bespoke display cases for this collection.

Visitors will also have the option of donating their toys and games to the Christmas charities if items are not used in the exhibition.

As part of this event, we are keen to discover what Oxford's favourite toys and games are! If you would like to help us find this out, you can fill in this form to let us know what toys and games were a key part of your childhood. We will use these to help shape our exhibition.

We look forward to hearing your stories!

Fossils and Myths: Training with the Natural History Museum

We are very lucky that Sarah Lloyd and Anya Jung from the Natural History Museum are training a group of Year Eight students to co-run activity tables at our forthcoming Creature Festival on 11th October!

The students were introduced on Monday to a range of fascinating fossils and other biofacts, as well as some activities which have been used by the museum at open days and events. The students were asked to think about how these activities might be engaging for visitors.

There was a mask making activity and an activity involving trying to spot walruses from space!

The students then each chose an object which they wlll research and prepare to introduce to visitors, thinking particularly about how these items have inspired stories about creatures in myths and stories.

Amazing Brain Festival and Exhibition Launch!

Yesterday we celebrated the arrival of the fabulous Your Amazing Brain Exhibition with our Brain Festival!

Visitors of all ages were able to explore the Your Amazing Brain Exhibition which has been installed on the ground floor of the Brighouse Building. It features a range of information boards and interactive activities exploring aspects of the brain, from the way we process faces, to the optical and sensory illusions we experience. It is designed and created by the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, in partnership with Banbury Museum & Gallery.

We were very grateful to the many organisations who came to run stalls and activities including the University of Oxford Department of Paediatrics who ran a stall on baby brains, the Department of Pharmacology and science artist Lizzie Burns who ran a fascinating brain art and discovery room, the Brain and Language Lab who looked at the errors brains make through scribal mistakes, Dan Holloway and his Memory Game, and the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics who explored hearing and the brain. The Classics Faculty was also represented with a stall exploring ancient and modern reactions to experiences!

We are also grateful to our Museum Council students who designed and ran a range of stalls, ranging from finding out what brain type you have, to unscrambling neurons to exploring the sense of smell to optical illusions. A team of Year Twelves also ran activities such as "lipid bingo", animal brains, and exploring brain scans using giant playing cards. Finally, the Travelling Natural History Museum brought a T Rex which people could get inside and operate, and Apollo Falconry bought an owl and a kestrel!

After all the excitement of the stalls and exhibitions, Professor Sophie Scott delivered a very engaging talk on The Brain: Ten Things You Should Know, and Oscar from Y10 performed some brain and love themed songs at the start and finish. A very big thank you to everyone who took part, whether visiting and exploring, or running a stall and activity.

Call for Technology Items

Next term, we are excited to be working with the History of Science Museum on an exciting project to create some new technology displays in our new cabinets on the first floor of the Lane Building.

We already have a small collection of technology items in our Technology through Time Collection. In order to develop our collections, we are calling for members of the wider community to loan or donate items to our collections.

We plan to work with Year Nine History students to explore both our own artefacts and ones which we are donated from the local community, and to create displays which narrate the stories of these objects in a way which connect with lots of strands of the school curriculum, from history and culture, to design and economy.

We plan to work with Chris Parkin, Learning Officer from the History of Science Museum, who will run a series of workshops with the students to introduce the themes and objects, and then work closely to co-curate a set of displays about the objects which will be accessible, engaging, and relevant to the lives and experiences of the 1700 students who visit the school site each day, as well as for the wider community of parents, staff, and visitors.

We are interested in any sort of technical item from any era, right up to present day, so if you have anything you'd be happy to loan or donate, please get in touch on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Rumble Museum Brain Season Begins

We are excited to be launching our Brain Season at the Rumble Museum this January!

The season will include the usual mix of breakfast talks, workshops, displays and events, including our sixth form Explore Your Brain conference all day on Tuesday 12th March. The conference will involve twelve different organisations running workshops, and two keynote speakers delivering talks for the sixth form and some students from Year Eleven.

As well as this, we are privileged to be hosting Your Amazing Brain, an exhibition designed and created by the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. The exhibition features striking educational displays and interactive exhibits, all exploring the brain's behaviours, structure and abilities.

Watch this space for more news on our Brain Season and how you can take part!

Fire juggling, owls and ancient mazes transform Cheney School at Labyrinth Festival

On Friday 20th October, the Rumble Museum held a Labyrinth Festival at Cheney School, celebrating labyrinths through the ages from ancient Knossos to modern day films and stories. Cheney students and external organisations ran a range of creative activities and stalls exploring mazes and labyrinths, including a room themed on Knossos, with 3D printed artefacts from the Ashmolean's Knossos exhibition, a Linear B logogram guessing activity, octopus jar decoration, a giant magnetic maze, and beautiful displays by East Oxford Primary School children, explore labyrinths on mine craft with the Story Museum, and take part in printing on the Rumble Museum's Victorian printing press.

There was monster-making, a floor labyrinth game, a giant labyrinth escape room, Cheney's own walkable labyrinth, and people in character from ancient Greek history and myth.

Alongside explorations of the ancient labyrinth, there was an emphasis on the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth - and visitors were able to meet the goblin king (aka Juggling John Haynes) on stilts juggling crystals, watch fire juggling shows, be quizzed by 'riddle doors', see beautiful owls from Apollo Falconry, and take part in a masked ball and create elaborate masks. They were also able to meet puppeteer Rob Tygner, who worked on the character Hoggle on the original film, and to hear a talk by Dr Andrea Wright on Jim Henson's worlds created on film.

All visitors were given a special Labyrinth pass and map, and they were able to fill out all the activities they visited and be entered for a prize draw.

It was an afternoon packed full of wonder, and we are very grateful to the many Cheney students and external organisations who ran exciting stalls and activities, and to the very many visitors who came to the festival.

Astronomy and Stargazing Evening: Thursday 18th December

On Tuesday 19th December, we were blessed with beautiful clear skies just in time for our astronomy and stargazing evening!

Dr Lucy Oswald gave a fascinating opening talk on pulsars and black holes in the assembly hall for over 100 visitors of all ages, and this was swiftly followed by stargazing in the Lane Yard, where stunning views of the moon’s surface, the rings of Saturn, and Jupiter and its four moons were clearly visible through the telescopes.

Meanwhile in Lane, Museum Council students from Years Eight, Nine and Ten ran fourteen different activity stalls ranging from rocket launching and fortune telling to a quiz show and star trail, with almost everything you could imagine in between! As well as all this, Oscar in Year 10 played and sang a range of star-themed songs before the opening talk for visitors to enjoy, and the sixth form enrichment committee turned L1 into a “stellarium”.

Cheney friends kindly provided star-themed refreshments for the event. We are very grateful to the History of Science Museum, who brought astronomical artefacts to see, to Lucy for the fantastic opening talk, and to all our visiting experts who brought telescopes.

Well done to the amazing work of museum council students in preparing and running exciting and enjoyable activities all evening!

Labyrinth Season at the Rumble Museum

Some of our Rumble Museum Council students dedicated a day of their summer holiday to painting a large medieval-style walkable labyrinth on site at the school ready for the school’s Rumble Museum season of labyrinth themed events next term.

The permanent labyrinth was marked out by Haywood Landscapes, and then painted by the team of students from Years Nine through to Eleven ready to be walked by students, staff and visitors next week. Walking labyrinths are widely reported as having a range of well-being benefits, as well as being a fun and interesting feature with a complex and varied history.

The season of events run by the school’s Rumble Museum will include a range of speakers exploring labyrinths through history, from the labyrinth at Knossos in Crete which was famously imagined in Greek myth to imprison the Minotaur, to modern versions and their uses in a range of locations today. There will also be workshops and projects, and a labyrinth themed afternoon of activities and stalls. The Rumble Museum has been kindly donated a set of beautiful display boards from the Ashmolean’s own recent Labyrinth Exhibition which will be put up on site this week for students and staff to enjoy.

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