Cowley Road Carnival

Here's our intern Hannah to report on the Cowley Road Carnival:

"We have just about recovered from our jam-packed day at the Cowley Road Carnival on Sunday 6^th July! Our team consisted of the HLF Skills for the Future Trainees, the Pitt Rivers Head of Education, Andy McLellan, and the Museum of Oxford Education & Learning Officer, Carly Smith-Huggins.

Dream team of mask makers© Pitt Rivers Museum

To fit with the theme ‘Faces of Oxford’ we thought what better way to make this connection with our museum collections than mask making!  There was a wide range of templates to design your own mask, or your could decorate an existing design such as a mummy face to look just like the female mummy Meresamun at the Ashmolean, or you could even fashion a dinosaur face with matching feet for a stompingly good dinosaur at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

2.15pm selfie © Pitt Rivers Museum 

The sun shone all day as we busily helped over 200 visitors of all ages create their own masks. After the fantastic procession, we were ready for a wave of more customers looking for a fun craft.

As well as the making activity we also had a range of handling objects to further the faces theme and to widen the audiences knowledge of our collections, including: Javanese dance masks, a horse’s skull and fossilised dinosaur poo - a real hit with the young ones! 

Trying on Masks © Pitt Rivers Museum

Faces of Oxford © Pitt Rivers Museum 

Our visitors were also encouraged to use the carnival board painted by Charlotte Orr at the Pitt RiversMuseum. A brilliant way to get people to be ‘part of the collections!’  These are 'Faces of Oxford’ after all…




Overall it was a super successful day. I speak on behalf of the trainees when I say how pleased we were with how it went. We were satisfied with our decision to keep the craft simple so there was a fast turnaround with the masks made. A brilliant day, full of fun, crafty people in the surroundings of the bustling Cowley Road."