Engineering and Medicine students took an academic excursion to London yesterday, visiting the key cultural and historical sites for their chosen subject. Medics went first to the Wellcome Collection, which styles itself, with gentle medical punnage, ‘the free destination for the incurably curious’. Indeed, with a current collection exploring medical and other scientific issues through art, lectures and interactive sessions, there is much to keep the inquisitive mind captivated. Thence to the Alexander Fleming museum, and to the very room in which the eponymous individual discovered penicillin in 1928. Students were surprised by the smallness of the room that hosted this great invention.

Engineering students found their own intellectual playground in London’s Science Museum. They particularly enjoyed the current blockbuster exhibition, Robots, which explores 500 years of human efforts to make machines human: from a 16th century automaton monk, to the latest in Japanese communication androids.

Back in Oxford, students went on a ghoulish ghost tour of the city. They felt the presence of ‘The Thing’ in Trinity Chapel, and remembered the burnings on Broad Street ―they bore witness to the very manhole that marks the spot of Archbishop Cranmer’s execution in 1556. We hope that there weren’t too many nightmares amongst the dreaming spires last night!