The story
Eton College is first of all a school, the boarding school for boys that Henry VI founded beside Windsor in 1440 and that has educated much of Britain's ruling class ever since. But five centuries of gifts from former pupils and benefactors have left it with real museum collections, and it opens several of them to visitors.
The standout is antiquities: a world-class group of Egyptian faience, painted mummy masks and portraits, gathered over generations. Alongside them sit some 1,600 watercolours and drawings, a natural-history museum, and a library of manuscripts so important that part of it is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
So among the medieval courtyards where pupils still study, a handful of small public museums let you in on what the school has quietly collected.
