Oxford Interiors

[major_clanger]

I've been very remiss in sorting through and uploading photos of late (I have dozens from last autumn's US/Canada trip to get through) so here are a couple of unusual interiors from a recent weekend in Oxford:



The Oxford Malmaison Hotel, formerly HM Prison Oxford.



The Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology. Well worth looking at the full-size version!

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I swear when I was a kid in Oxford (lo, these many moons since), the Pitt Rivers was down in a dark and crowded cellar, not these high spacious well-lit galleries it has now. Or is that just my mind concocting the kind of environment I think it ought to have? (I also remember a case full of live locusts. Which I associate irrevocably with Biblical plagues, of course. I think I may have thought they had all the plagues of Egypt, in cases around the museum. I may even have spent some time trying to hunt down the death-of-the-firstborn, for personal family reasons.) [I am third-born myself, since you ask.]

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

That photo may be slightly deceptive; it's a bit dimmer than that in actuality.

Don't recall any locusts, mind you.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It's possible that the locusts were up in the main museum; I sort of remember them in both places at once. Maybe they were quantum-locusts? Loci?

(I also remember a spiral staircase winding down to the Pitt Rivers, around that vasty totem pole they have. I think almost all my memories are deeply unreliable, basically...)

[owlfish]

It has been undergoing major renovations in the past few years. Not that I have been there since they started.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

The Pitt Rivers is still dark and still cluttered. And still seemingly in a cellar (you can see the steps leading down at the top of the picture).

The locusts were outside in the main museum though, being natural history. I think they were upstairs, on the gallery/balcony, but I didn't see them when we dropped in last year. There is a glass-sided beehive with external access up the stairs to the right.

PS

[desperance.livejournal.com]

But! They do still have the shrunken heads! I I thought discretion might have removed them or good manners returned them to their ancestral lands, but no. Still there, real ones and fakes together (the fakes are obviously monkey-heads, and no more convincing to modern eyes than Jenny Hanivers are as mermaids; but they must presumably have convinced someone at the time).

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

How was the lighting done in the hotel, particularly the blue-lit doorways?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I think it may have been high-intensity LED lighting. The door lighting may have come out a bit bluer in that picture than in reality, mind you - the lighting mix was very odd.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad to see that the Pitt-Rivers is essentially the same as it was when I went last, pre-refurb!
It makes me want to get back there and have a poke around

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

also I just realised that the first picture is a HOTEL! must inspect further...