The launch of Oxford Open Doors, the annual weekend of activities allowing the public to visit many of Oxford’s hidden gems, promises to be a poignant occasion this weekend.

For it will commemorate two important Oxford anniversaries and the close of a notable career.

The official start of Oxford Open Doors 2010 on Saturday morning will coincide with the unveiling of the Darwin Plinth at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, by the university’s vice-chancellor, Prof Andrew Hamilton.

The plinth that will permanently stand outside the museum’s main entrance was designed by 15-year-old Poppy Simonson, a pupil at St Helen and St Katharine’s School, Abingdon. She won a competition to design a fitting monument to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the legendary encounter that took place at the museum in 1860, when the scientist Thomas Huxley took on Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, to win the day for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Women were said to have fainted as Huxley laid into the stuffy bishop, who had tried to ridicule Darwin’s theories. Legend has it that the meeting ended in uproar with Huxley, the hero of the hour, chaired shoulder high from the scene of science’s greatest victory over religion.

Remarkably, the encounter is still causing furious debate in Oxford to this day.

One contributor to the Oxford Magazine, the prestigious university weekly, expressed outrage that the university was about to make a fool of itself by commemorating what was “a transient intellectual squib, exerting the most tenuous effect upon the contemporary scene, and only inflated into a world changing event in the 20th century”.

Allan Chapman went on to add: “More importantly, future generations of school children should not be sold fantasy for hard historical fact.”

Historical fact or not, Miss Simonson’s design, carved from limestone, chosen from 58 entries from 16 local schools, will be taking pride of place at the front of the museum, showing birds, reptiles and creatures featured in volumes describing Darwin’s travels around the world.

What cannot be denied is that the meeting, organised by the British Association, took place in the museum in 1860 — the year that this vast neo-Gothic cathedral to science opened to the public, with minimum fanfare.

The director of the museum, Prof Jim Kennedy, admits to having been taken aback by the vehemence of some of the opposition to the plinth. But he is delighted, at least, that the museum’s 150th birthday — the second anniversary mentioned earlier — fell as he prepared to retire after an Oxford University career spanning 43 years.

Prof Kennedy, who has been the museum’s director since 2003, said: “The anniversary year comes at a time when the reputation of the museum and the contribution it makes to the university and the city has never been higher.

“With over half a million visitors in 2009 and tens of thousands of school pupils coming through our doors each year, we are one of the most visited places in Oxford.”

The anniversary is being marked with the launch of a £5.5m fundraising drive to fund several major projects, including the construction of a new visitor centre and the digitisation of the museum’s massive insect, fossil and other collections. Many of the insects in the collection are still stored in their original Victorian cabinets.

The museum’s entomological, geological and zoological collections are internationally famous, with exhibits ranging from towering dinosaurs to wildlife specimens in illuminated jars. The 5.78m specimens include the only surviving remains of the dodo and the first scientifically described remains of dinosaurs.

But Prof Kennedy, who arrived at the museum in 1967 and was appointed curator of the geological collections in 1976, was determined to ensure that the astonishing building itself is properly celebrated in its anniversary year.

It was built to provide Oxford with a permanent home for the sciences in the middle of the 19th century, when it seemed that science in the university was in a terminal decline.

While the university had been swamped by natural history collections, they had been dispersed in unsuitable surroundings across the university.

Many of Oxford’s most famous Victorian figures, such as Henry Acland and John Ruskin, were involved in its creation, but the early death of the museum’s brilliant Irish architect, Benjamin Woodward, means one of the greatest contributions to both the city and university is rarely recognised.

Woodward won a high-profile competition to design the new Oxford science museum, but one insightful Oxford observer noted the winner was a man “of rare genius and deep artistic knowledge” who already had “the shadow of an early death stealing over him”.

The foundation stone of the new Oxford University Museum, as it was originally known, was laid in 1855 by the chancellor of the university, the Earl of Derby, at a great Oxford ceremony.

But by then Woodward was already seriously ill from tuberculosis. He died the year after the museum opened to the public, alone at an inn in Lyons, while travelling home from Algiers, where he had spent the winter months.

Heartbreakingly, he lies in an unmarked grave in the Cimitiere Loyasse.

Perhaps we should not mourn the lack of any suitable monument to him, for, as with Sir Christopher Wren and St Paul’s Cathedral, to see Woodward’s monument, it is necessary only to walk into the great museum and look around you.

It was the first major building in the Gothic style since the Houses of Parliament built 20 years earlier and, in the view of many, remains the most stunning Victorian Gothic building in the UK.

The iron columns, arches and spandrels of the museum were designed like the skeleton of some great beast, mirroring the skeletons of the whales, elephants and dinosaurs below.

A forest of ironwork forms the nave and aisle of this vast cathedral of science, with the glass roof supported by slender columns of iron and a railway station-like vaulting, with the ironwork decorated with delicately-wrought foliage and fruits.

“You know in the 1950s, the chemists wanted to pull it down,” whispered Prof Kennedy, as he led me around the exhibition. “Victorian, you see.”

The cost was to far exceed the £30,000 that was budgeted for. Significant sums of money were transferred to the university from the profits of the university press. Ironically, given the museum’s place in the science-versus-religion debate, it turns out that much of the funding came from the sale of Bibles in the Mid-West of America.

Among Prof Kennedy’s last tasks, has been the overseeing of special events at the museum for the Oxford Open Doors weekend.

Now in its fourth year, Oxford Open Doors, which runs on September 11 and 12, will involve more than 150 events and activities across the city. The event is run by Oxford Preservation Trust and Oxford University.

This year’s highlights will include the chance to view the earliest printing press and the archives of Oxford University Press, the city’s old power station and the Radcliffe Infirmary site, where plans for the site will be on display in the chapel.

There are also opportunities to visit Thames Valley Police, Oxford Prison and tour Oxford United Football Club’s Kassam Stadium.

But there could be few more fitting places to launch the event than Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History’s new plinth to Darwin — for can there really be a single building or one man that have opened more doors in the Victorian or any other age.

  • University College will not be open on Sunday and The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Marston Road, is open for pre-booked tours only on both Saturday and Sunday. For other news and updates to the printed programme see www.oxfordopendoors.org.uk