Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean has a fair claim to being the first public museum in the world. When it opened in Oxford on 24 May 1683, anyone who paid could walk in, at a time when collections were the private business of princes and scholars. Its core came from the Tradescants, a father-and-son pair of gardeners and collectors who had gathered curiosities from around the globe, and it passed to Elias Ashmole, who gave the lot to the university on condition it build somewhere to show them.

The original building had a chemistry laboratory in the basement and a lecture theatre, because this was meant to be a place for learning by looking. The collection has since grown far beyond its cabinet-of-curiosities start into art and archaeology of real weight.

Today you can see Paolo Uccello's dreamlike Hunt in the Forest, one of the earliest paintings anywhere to play with vanishing-point perspective, the jewel-like Alfred Jewel made for a 9th-century English king, and the ceremonial cloak known as Powhatan's Mantle, a rare object from the Native American world the Tradescants once collected.