The bare bones

The winner of this year's Guardian Family Friendly Museum award lets kids get to grips with the exhibits, says Dea Birkett
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
Case in point ... Digging into the history of 'Magic, Witchcraft and Trial by Ordeal' at the Pitt Rivers Museum

It was the long, thin bone - the size of a femur - that clinched it. There it lay, in the middle of the table, being stared at, then fingered by five kids. What was it? Where did it come from? How old was it? What were you supposed to do with it?

The bone was one of several intriguing objects in a backpack provided by the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Museum of Natural History - two Oxford museums that share a front door, and that had been jointly nominated for the Guardian Family Friendly Museum award for their "Family Friendly Sundays". One of the activities offered at these weekly events is the backpacks. Anyone can take one out for free, and they lead you on a trail around the museum, searching for objects that match the contents of the backpack.

The five judges for the Guardian's Family Friendly Museum award 2005 - all children aged from eight to 16 - were immediately attracted to the bone. It made them curious. It made them question. It made them want to know more. Surely that's what any family-friendly activity ought to do - make visitors of all and every age want to linger and discover, they all said. And from a strong shortlist of five - including Compton Verney, Falmouth art gallery, Museum of Farnham, and the Wordsworth Trust - the judges went on to pluck out the Pitt Rivers and the NMH as the winner, every young hand thrusting into the air. It was a historic moment. For the first time, children had chosen what they valued in a museum - rather than museums what they expected from their younger visitors.

Judge Ben Duch, 10, saw the backpacks as an opportunity to open up the serendipity of the museum collection. "I'd look for the things that were in it, and then might find even more interesting stuff," he said.

His friend and and judge, Samuel Kennedy, 10, had a clear idea what museums should do: "Make difficult things easy to understand." All of the shortlisted museums did this - but the Oxford pair did it best.

Interestingly, the young people were not impressed by high-tech innovations. At the Oxford museums, there's not a single button to push or one computer screen. Instead, there's a set of old wooden collector's cabinets ordered from A to Z, so anyone can pull a drawer open and guess what the object is - A is an ammonite, D dried dung beetles, O an ostrich feather, T trilobites. And nothing could be simpler than the basket of measuring tapes anyone can help themselves to, with a list of possible things to be measured: the Alice in Wonderland flamingo's leg, the baby elephant's toe, the tuna's skeleton. Even teenage Iona Perkins, at 16 the oldest judge, thought she might enjoy discovering the length of the giant Nile crocodile's head.

The Oxford museums do do something quietly radical, though. As in all museums, the Pitt Rivers and the NMH have plenty of glass cases, storing dinosaur skeletons, meteorites and talking drums. But there are also objects liberated from their cabinets, so that you can feel the 29-million-year-old lump of gneiss rock and stroke a stuffed cheetah. But all items must be touched with respect - it's a gentle lesson to the children in how to value objects, and how to recognise that there are some that can be safely handled and some that can't. This is rare: at most museums, the "hands on" element is new machines and purpose-made interactive models, and the "hands off" is the collection. Here, it's certain items of the collection itself that can be handled.

The judges also said they were fed up of having to book (and sometimes buy) tickets for museum workshops long in advance. For the Family Friendly Sundays in Oxford, you just pitch up, and there's always something to do and nothing you have to do. If you want to make a pirate hat to walk around in while you follow the pirate trail to the pyrite (pirates' gold), then fine; but if, like my 12-year-old, you consider yourself a little too old for wearing paper hats but not too old for following a trail, you can just do the bits you like.

All the activities follow the same take-of-it-what-you-want philosophy, so you find toddlers sitting next to teenagers, both scribbling away on an activity sheet but at their own very different levels. There's no wrong or right way of doing things, and no sense that you'll be assessed at the end, as has happened with so much of the recent emphasis on education in museums. There are tables to sit at, if you want to sit down, and clipboards to borrow if you want to wander around. Best of all, there are torches for the Pitt Rivers Museum, which has no natural light so the extraordinary collection sits in semi-darkness. My four-year-old loved to illuminate the shrunken heads with his beam. It was a clever way for the museum to make younger children focus on a single object, and really look.

The trick these twin museums seem to have cracked is to have family-friendly activities that are unstructured and fun, yet directly relevant to their collection. So often you can turn up at a museum and find a workshop in Chinese mask making, when there isn't a single Chinese mask in the collection. So what's the point in doing the activity there, rather than in your own sitting room? In Oxford, every activity refers to an object they hold.

At the Pitt Rivers and the NMH, children stroke huge ammonites, deal out the contents of a sorting box between jumping and non-jumping insects, gingerly put their hands in the dinosaur's jaw. Yet there is little noise and no commotion, as each and every child, of any age, is enthralled, because each has been helped to find something that interests and holds them. In the relative peace and calm, even the odd unaccompanied adult seemed happy.

As one grandparent said, visiting with his two- and four-year-old grandchildren: "It's very hands-on for children. It makes them ask questions about the exhibits, which gives them confidence to query information they're given, not only in lessons, but in life."

· Pitt Rivers Museum ( and Oxford University Museum of Natural History ( win a Sony digital camera and six Hippychick hip seats for young visitors (

The runners up receive a copy of Britain's Best Museums and Galleries by Mark Fisher (Penguin). For more details of the Guardian Kids in Museums Campaign, and to download a free Kids in Museums Manifesto and Quentin Blake poster, go to

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