February 24 – May 29, 2022

May 5 – June 6, 2022

March 3 – May 22, 2022

The goddesses who broke the rules of sex and power – and embodied our anxieties

Revealing the women composers who have been overlooked

April 21 – May 18, 2022

April 1 – June 18, 2022

February 11 – May 22, 2022

March 25 – May 22, 2022

The art and photography that depict Her Majesty reveal some interesting truths

Why 'a spirit of equal exchange' is essential in fashion

The bizarre 16th Century 'dance plague' that gripped French city Strasbourg

Top Gun: Maverick is better than the original

3 min read

The smellier side of the Stuarts in Oxford

A former Oxfam employee recalls a visit by the queen to the charity’s Summertown offices in the late 1990s. ‘We had to have a brand new toilet and washbasin installed,’ he says, ‘in case she needed to go. The queen can’t use a toilet someone else has sat on.’

Royal visitors in previous centuries were less squeamish. During the plague year in London (1665) the court of Charles II decamped to Oxford for the summer. The king and his ministers lived at Christ Church College, the queen and her entourage at Merton. Anthony à Wood, a local historian of the time, complained in his diary: ‘Though they were neat and gay in their apparell, yet they were very nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, colehouses, cellers. Rude, rough whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless.’ Horrible Histories puts it even more graphically. The court was filthy not only in its habits, but also in its morals. Later that year Charles’ mistress, the Countess of Castlemaine, gave birth to the king’s illegitimate son. The countess was part of the queen’s court at Merton, where an outraged Fellow pinned an obscene poem (in Latin and English) to her door.

To be fair, disposal of human waste was not easy in the seventeenth century. Poorer households threw it into the street while more affluent ones might have a cesspit in the cellar, but the contents still had to be removed, often through the house. In royal palaces, human excrement piled up in underground chambers until it could be taken away. This accumulation of rubbish and sewage was one of the reasons why the Tudor courts went ‘on progress’ from one palace to another in the summer months.

Charles II was not the first Stuart king to live at Christ Church. In 1642, during the Civil War against Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, Charles I made Oxford his capital. This turned the city into a garrison town, filled with troops and preparations for battle. The university supported the king, and New College was made into a munitions workshop. But local people, who mainly favoured the Parliamentarians, were not happy. They were taxed for funds, required to recycle their metal possessions for manufacture of weapons and coins, and had to provide lodgings for the king’s followers. The presence of the court and the military meant that the town was overpopulated. Human and animal waste piled up in the streets and in 1643 this led to a typhus epidemic in the city. You can find out more about the Oxford court of Charles I, and typhus outbreaks in the city, from short videos and displays in the Museum of Oxford.

Written by volunteer Jane Buekett. 

Is it possible to reboot our minds by living a more feral existence?

How the death of Paris student Malik Oussekine changed France forever

14 min read

The only known Black British man to have fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War

“I am half Black, I grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. Fascism meant hunger and war”.

Of the countless people born in Oxfordshire, few lived such an incredible life as Charlie Hutchison. Born in 1918, Charlie became the only known Black British man to have fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He was also among the first to travel to Spain, one of the youngest, and also one of the longest serving volunteers. His life-long hatred of fascism would bring him to participate in many key events in history, including the Battle of Cable Street, the Dunkirk Evacuation, the liberation of France and Italy. During WWII he also took part in the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Charlie spent 10 years fighting a bloody crusade against various fascist movements throughout Europe. Once returning to Britain he married the love of his life and started a family, living the rest of his life as an activist involved in anti-apartheid, nuclear disarmament, and trade unionism.

Despite all his achievements, his life story had gone entirely unnoticed by Oxford historians until very recently. When the Oxford Spanish Civil War Memorial was unveiled in 2017, Charlie Hutchison was not recognised among the 31 known people with links to Oxfordshire to whom the memorial had been dedicated to. Despite being overlooked by professional historians, his achievements were eventually made public knowledge in 2019 thanks to a project by London school children.

Note: This article contains never-before published photographs of Charlie Hutchison, provided by Charlie Hutchison’s daughter Susan Lilian Small and published on the Museum of Oxford website with her permission.

“This is my Versailles,” Mike Gibson says as we stand in a backyard in Bishopville, South Carolina. He pauses for a moment, regarding this perfect site of precisely trimmed trees and geometric shrubs, and displays an abundance of pride. For me, this topiary garden is a wonderland. Standing in the shadows of a row of slinky, sensuous, and hulking trees, I feel a deep sense of letting go as the trees accept my admiration.

Five months ago, Gibson acquired the unique title of topiary artist-in-residence of the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, and as we stand there the 35-year-old exudes a sureness that he is exactly where he should be. But building something to last forever is difficult. Everything here is always a work in progress. Nothing is lost on Gibson: There is a dying juniper, and many of the beds need clearing. The longer he looks, the longer his to-do list grows.

You wonder how one man could have built all this. Yet one man did. Pearl Fryar began this journey back in 1980 after looking for a home near his job as an engineer for a Coca-Cola bottling factory. Fryar, who is Black, felt unwelcome in a white neighborhood near the plant (“Black people don’t keep up their yards,” he was told) and settled on a mostly Black residential street farther out in Lee County. It was there that he began his relentless pursuit of the little Garden of the Month lawn sign that a local garden club awarded to meticulously groomed yards in the neighborhood. Fryar would work 12-hour shifts at the factory and then labor through the night on his garden with the help of a floodlight, a double-blade gas-powered hedge trimmer, a wobbly ladder, and a jury-rigged hydraulic lift. He did this with no training or horticultural books. He simply listened to the trees, opening them up, allowing the sun to shine in.

In 1984 a small pom-pom topiary caught his eye at a local nursery. The garden center’s owner gave Fryar a three-minute pruning lesson and a throwaway juniper to practice on. Fryar planted it, cultivated it (with no fertilizer or pesticides), pruned it, and was hooked. Soon came another plant, then another, mostly whatever he could rescue from the nursery’s compost heap, unwanted or near-death plants that were given to him or sold to him cheap. Gibson estimates that 40 percent of the trees in the garden came from the trash.

March 19 – May 1, 2022

March 4 – April 30, 2022