Projects

The Rumble Museum at Cheney School is 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 their Lane Building.

The school museum already houses a 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 already have a 1950s Bakelite Television, 1930s gramophone, a 1950s radio, a electric typewriter and a 1990s mobile phone and many other items in our collection, which are all on display at Cheney School. 

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.

We are also looking for stories, memories and experiences of using these technologies to create an oral history of the collection. We are running a Collection and Exhibition Afternoon on 19th March. If you would like to share any memories or stories, please get in touch.

The Museum of Climate Hope project is an exciting new project led by Bill Finnegan from the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment. The project will create a digital trail across the six different University of Oxford locations in the city.  There will be one object in each place. Cheney’s  Rumble Museum has been invited to be the seventh location for the trail!

In order to choose our own objects for the trail, our Museum Councils drew up a shortlist of five possible objects to include in the trail. Every student at Cheney then had the opportunity to vote on which object best represents the theme of Climate Hope!

We also gave the wider community the chance to cast their vote on the five shortlisted objects from our collections. The objects chosen can be viewed below with text from our Museum Council students on why they have chosen the items.

In autumn 2022, students in 8* and 8Up classes at Cheney began an exciting Rumble Museum project delivered in partnership with the University of Oxford, Dr Philippa Matthews, Dr Sally Frampton and local science-based artist Dr Lizzie Burns.

It explored the use of vaccines in the past and present, as well as ideas about the future of vaccines too. It was part of a wider project, Infecting Minds, which was also delivered in two schools in South Africa, and ideas and artwork were shared between all schools involved. The project ran every Monday throughout October, November and December, and included a trip to explore plants and medicine at the Botanical Gardens. Students created artwork, posters and craft items in response to the wide variety of ideas and information about the past, present and future of vaccines.

In our first session, the groups drew self-portraits. They were then invited to express their thoughts about vaccines. After this, the group looked at a range of artefacts from the Covid pandemic, which have become very familiar in our daily lives, and to imagine what archaeologists from the future might make of these items. They included facemasks, lateral flow tests, and posters encouraging people to get vaccinated. Finally, everyone decorated a facemask with their own designs in response to the ideas and thoughts from the session.

We are delighted to announce that the Rumble Museum has been awarded a Wild Escape grant for an exciting project engaging primary school children with our natural history collections.

In partnership with the Oxford Natural History Museum, we have run tree trail tours and workshops for primary school groups on butterflies and biodiversity on site at the Rumble Museum. These workshops and trails introduced the children to the role and lifespan and homes of the British butterflies in our Rumble Museum collection, and explored the role of the butterflies in a biodiverse environment.

The children then take part in workshops run back at their own school which supported them in writing stories imagining these butterflies in our trees on site in the more nature-rich future. They have also created artwork for their stories.

These stories and artwork are being displayed in a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum on 22nd April to celebrate Earth Day.

We have greatly enjoyed working with Barton Park Primary, St Andrew's Primary and Wood Farm Primary on this project, and with Chris Jarvis from the Natural History Museum who ran fascinating workshops for the groups.

You can view the artwork and stories which the children have produced online here (this is still being added to).

The Wild Escape is made possible by lead support from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants, with additional support from Art Fund

In June and July 2021, our Year Eight Museum Council each chose a favourite butterfly from our British Butterflies Collection and worked with local mosaicist Clare Goodall to create individual mosaics of each of the butterflies. The group installed the mosaics on an outside wall on C Block over the summer holidays.

From left to right, the butterflies are: brimstone, peacock, comma, common blue, red admiral, small copper, holly blue, chalkhill blue, black-veined white (now extinct in Britain), orange tip, wall brown, and large white.

From left to right, our student artists are: Tess Gimson, Scarlett Parsler, Cherie Liu, Rachel Robinson, Anna Deakin, Drew Milne, Catriona Baxter, Izzy Wearden, Imo Robinson Vilain, Adam Diesel, Logan Cameron, and Binamra Shrestha.

Last term, our Museum Council students worked with Rumble director Lorna to create a tube map of the Rumble Museum's collections and displays.

The tube map is an iconic design, loved by many, and its striking simplicity in mapping out the complex underground system made it an ideal way to map out the very varied and spread out nature of the Rumble collections and galleries! The students set to work on planning what the different lines should be, how they should intersect, and what colours they should be. Lines include "classics", "art", "nature", "science" and "future" lines. There is also a "protest" line featuring artefacts connected to protest throughout history such as our Suffragette and Racial Justice collections. A "literature" line explores dystopian fiction and Stranger Things-related objects from the 1980s.

They also invented the idea of a "beeline", which would be a special line that mapped out the "must see objects" in the museum. The beeline stops were chosen by Year Nine students and include an ancient Greek tetradrachm coin featuring Athena and her owl, a Victorian Albion Printing Press recently donated to the museum, our World War Two gas mask and Covid vaccine vials from the first roll-out of the vaccine, amongst many other items.

Other innovations they made to the tube map included making the crossover stops hexagon-shaped rather than round to reflect the hexagon theme of the Rumble Museum, and having large hexagon images on the main tube map as well as smaller signs showing the stand-out artefacts. 

Once they had all their ideas and designs in place, these were handed over to local designer Naomi Waite to turn into the beautiful map that you can see below. The huge (3 metre by 2 metre) map is appearing this week in main reception and also in the outside space, so students and visitors alike can enjoy it. A number of smaller signs will soon be appearing in individual buildings showing which lines run through those buildings and more must-see objects.

The Rumble Museum is planning to produce tickets for particular routes which can get stamped for different events throughout the year.