Museum within a School, evening reception 13th March, 6 – 8pm, Cheney School

We are delighted to be holding a drinks reception at the East Oxford Community Classics Centre at Cheney School on Friday 13th March, 6 – 8pm, to launch our artefact collection and wider project to create a museum at the classics centre. The event will enable visitors to see and handle some items in our collection, view sketches for forthcoming artefact story trail murals, which will be painted across the school campus, and speak to archaeologists and project leaders. Drinks and Roman-inspired refreshments will be available!

If you would like to attend for some or all of the evening, please email

The centre is privileged to own a wide range of items, ranging from mesolithic tools (dating 8000 – 4000 BC), a large number of Roman glass and pottery fragments, tesserae, roof tiles and a catapult shot – these have been donated to us by museums, individuals and universities. In the past few months an archaeologist has been working with us to create a comprehensive digital database of these items, which we now host online, so visitors, students and many others can view the items and understand more about them.

A group of Cheney School students has been involved in the process of categorising the items and entering them into the database. We are training a group of students every year in the artefacts collection database and handling – these students will then become “student curators” for the collection during their time at the school.

We are also creating artefact story trails, which will appear in various parts of the school – consisting of murals showing how the artefacts were made, how they were used and how they were discovered, and featuring the artefacts themselves. Each mural will extend along a school corridor encompassing a series of detailed vignettes. These trails will be a way of immersing visitors and students in the history of these fascinating items.

Alongside this, we are developing workshops involving the artefacts which will be embedded into the “What Is History” module studied by all year 7s at Cheney School. These workshops will also be delivered to students and other visitors from the wider community. Through his work at the centre, we aim to make the artefacts collection a vital, accessible and exciting aspect of the centre that Cheney School students and the community at large will learn about and benefit from.

Understanding Museums Exhibition

We are also delighted to announce a forthcoming exhibition to be hosted at the EOCCC, which is the culmination of a project called ‘Understanding Museums: Deaf, visually impaired and ethnic minority groups’, which has been generously funded by Oxford University’s Communicating Ancient Greece and Rome programme (an AHRC funded programme), with additional funding from the Arts Council England (ACE) and Classical Association (CA).

The exhibition looks at how to make museum collections (specifically Classical collections) more accessible to Deaf, visually impaired and ethnic minority groups, based upon the findings of group discussions that took place in September 2014 in London and Birmingham. The exhibition will consist of clay bowls and objects made by the ethnic minority focus group, which explored ways in which the Roman Empire could be better understood by individuals from different cultural backgrounds. A wall hanging and video providing an overview of the project, as well as video clips showing the thoughts and comments of the project’s participants will also be on display.

As part of our work on developing the museum at the Classics Centre, we are exploring ways to make our collections as accessible and widely-used as possible, and Maria’s exhibition and project work is an example of how collections can reach out to wider audiences.

A website for the exhibition can be found at http://www.understandingmuseums.com

For more information about the East Oxford Community Classics Centre, please visit www.eoccc.org.uk