This was perhaps my favorite museum visit of the entire trip, and it was not really about building or architecture at all. It was about prehistoric mammals! Colossal amphibians! Giants of the land before time! And lots and lots of tiny fossils, bugs, bones, and butterflies. This was the University Museum of Keble College, Oxford, which has an astounding natural history collection, as well as a sub-collection of anthropological oddities (the South American shrunken heads are a timeless classic). I've visited the American and National museums of natural history in DC and NY countless times, appreciated their old-school dioramas and ogled their gems and minerals, but what was special about this old museum in Oxford was its gigantic Gothic atrium spilling light down into a great hall cluttered with ranks upon ranks of wood-and-glass vitrines, interspersed with free-standing fossilized bones, skeletons, and jars of weird stuff. I'm going to backtrack and rhapsodize about the architecture just a little bit more: the iron columns supporting the prismatic glass roof of the atrium were decorated at the capitals with the most delicate metal filigree imitations of plant and flower species, and the stone columns holding up the brick walls of the arcaded building were carved with lifelike depictions of fantastic sea creatures, corals, plants, and animals. It was a natural history knock-out! As only the Victorians could have mustered.
