East Oxford Community Classics Centre

The East Oxford Community Classics Centre, hosted at Cheney School in Headington, is a learning venue for people of all ages to attend events, workshops, lessons, and exhibitions. It is run by educational charity The Iris Project, in association with the University of Oxford.
Launch
The centre was opened in October 2013 with a large community festival, including stalls, activities, drama performances and an opening talk by Professor Mary Beard.
Festivals and Events
The Centre organises community festivals and events throughout the year, aimed at bringing to life different areas of classics, and showing how they connect to a range of subject areas. The festivals include workshops, talks, stalls, activities and exhibitions. Recent festivals have included the Festival of Ancient Tales and the Ancient Astronomy Festival.
The centre also organises Living History events involving Cavalry Re-enactment shows.
Projects
The centre runs termly projects. These have involved a project exploring how ancient Greek heroes can be used for positive psychology, a Roman mosaics project where students made a very large mosaic themed on classics and East Oxford, and a Roman cookery project.
Library
The Community Classics Centre is home to a wide range of books for all age groups and all knowledge levels. It includes fiction and non-fiction, textbooks, magazines, and also a number of DVDs. The collection was made possible by numerous donations from Bettany Hughes, Cambridge University Press and others.
Museum
This collection of archaeological artefacts housed at the East Oxford Community Classics Centre covers a broad range of periods and regions - from Mesolithic stone tools (approximately 10,000 years old) to Medieval and post-Medieval pottery fragments (a few hundred years old). The collection has grown gradually out of generous donations from the public.
In order to extract this information from the collection, the East Oxford Community Classics Centre launched a project in November 2014 aimed at cataloguing, photographing and publishing all its archaeological artefacts. The stimulus behind this project has been to create a long-term resource that makes the most of the collection's educational potential.
Artefacts Story Trail
A number of murals are planned which explore possible biographies for some of the many Roman artefacts on display at the centre.
Most of the items the centre possesses are pieces of much larger objects, and the idea behind these mural trails is to show the story of how some of these items would have been made and used, and eventually broken, and discovered centuries later as fragments. Each trail will consist of three murals which trace these stories; the artefact itself will then appear in small cabinet at the end of the mural trail. The trails will eventually appear all across the school campus, as well as in feeder schools.

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