Summer Sojourns Part 1: Oxford, A Culture of Preservation

Oxford City Centre

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. -Marcus Garvey

Have you ever had the opportunity to step into a new culture and discover something about yourself? This summer I  was able to travel and spend 6 weeks discovering myself in two different countries and five different cities/towns. My journey began in Oxford, a city full of history and learning, a city characterized by a culture of preservation.


Walking down cobblestone sidewalks, one's eyes are constantly drawn upward to admire the beautiful stonework covering the walls nearby. Each building is brushed with hues of grey, white, and yellow, the aged stones looking as though someone painted them in watercolors. Put simply, the city is gorgeous. Part of its wonder lies in the history encased in ever street you walked down. Almost every mall, fast food restaurant, and tea shop is housed in buildings hundred of years old. The modern is blended perfectly with the past.

Oxford's Natural History Museum

The Glass Roof And Metal Arches of the Museum

In city center, there are at least three museums, each one free to the public. The first one I found was the Natural History Museum. You step inside and are struck by the high iron-work ceilings, and glass windows in the roof, with dinosaur skeletons stretching toward them.

The metal columns rest on stone bases, which rest on stone floors. As you walk through the aisles of cases displaying birds and reptiles, you almost can't pay attention to the objects before you. The building itself holds too much interest, tells too much of a story in its deliberate blend of old and new. This is intentional, my professor explains to me, to show how the new, modern ideas of science, rest on the foundations of the past.

Then  there was on the Ashmolean museum. The building is four or five levels of artifacts upon artifacts, from almost every culture. Egyptian statues and Greek vases, a whole room of Chinese brush-paintings, and another filled with rows and rows of English china--I spent two hours wandering through and still couldn't see everything, even though I began to spend less and less time with each section. The sheer amount of information available was incredible.

Perhaps just as interesting, in the theme of history, are the churches scattered throughout the city, many still being used for the same purpose they had hundreds of years ago. Some sanctuaries were so ornate that you walk in and are immediately overtaken by the color and carvings and stained glass windows that fill every inch of the room. Other churches you walk in and are touched by the simple beauty of white stones and gently sloping archways and the sheer space of the room. Each church told a story, about the values and beliefs of the people who attended services there, about how they worshiped, and how they viewed God.

The Rad Cam

My favorite set of buildings, though, and maybe the best testament of Oxford's culture of preservation, are the libraries. The Bodleian library is actually a system of buildings and offsite storage areas (one of which is an old salt mine) filled with millions of books.  The core buildings in Oxford city center consist of the Radcliffe Camera (affectionately called the Rad Cam), the Upper and Lower Reading rooms, and the Gladstone Link, which is an underground tunnel, with two levels full of books, connecting the Bodleian reading rooms and the Camera

The purpose of this library system is first and foremost as a scholarly collection, to gather and preserve the books. This means that while you can go in and access materials, you can't check any of them out. It's like the whole library is the reference section; you can go use the books, you just can't leave with them. Which made it an incredible place to study, honestly. The buildings themselves were again amazing, paintings along the edge of the ceilings, stone staircases and metal spiral staircases, and windows overlooking Oxford. There were rows and rows of desks with people coming and going. Sitting in those libraries, you realized what a priority learning is in Oxford. These books represent years of history, years of people coming to study, years of people wanting to safeguard the past to give to the future.

Walking down the streets of Oxford, the past is undeniably present in every corner. History isn't being erased and replaced by today's world but instead is acting as the foundations on which today is built. It is actively being preserved, even as the future moves forward and develops around it and through it. Being in that culture made me appreciate more than I ever have before how much the past has to offer us now, and made me appreciate how young America truly is. We are just a little sapling in comparison to so many other cultures, and sometimes I wounder, how well are we caring for our roots?