Uffington Museum

Tom Brown’s School Museum sits in the quiet Oxfordshire village of Uffington, beside the parish churchyard. The building itself is a 17th-century schoolroom where Thomas Hughes set scenes of his novel Tom Brown’s School Days. Hughes, who wrote the book in 1857, later became a local magistrate and MP. The museum also remembers Sir John Betjeman, the poet laureate, who lived in Uffington until his death in 1984. A single room holds displays on local archaeology and the White Horse carved into the hillside nearby. The museum keeps the story of the Uffington White Horse alive. This chalk figure, first recorded in 1190, stretches 114 metres across the Berkshire Downs. Hughes mentions the horse in his novel, linking the landscape to the book’s schoolboy adventures. Visitors learn how the figure may date back to the late Bronze Age, making it far older than the school itself. Betjeman often wrote of the horse in his poems and broadcasts. Inside, the low-beamed room holds cases of Roman coins, Saxon brooches and Victorian school reports. A corner is set aside for Hughes’s letters and early editions of his work. Outside, the churchyard contains Betjeman’s memorial stone, placed there after his death. Beyond the village, the White Horse gleams on the hill, a landmark unchanged since medieval times.