If you have an interest in Methodist History, and wish to visit 15 locations around Oxford City Centre related to John and Charles Wesley, or Methodism today, there a free mobile phone app, called Huntzz, which can take you round them on a free Treasure Hunt.
Instructions
Download the app onto your phone, and run it – you can do this from home (or your hotel in Oxford if you are visiting) before you start. You will see a list of available Hunts, sorted by distance from where you are.
Select the Wesley Walk in Oxford entry (you should only see one – mine has two as I developed it), and you should see a screen which looks like this:
As the screenshot above shows the start point is Wesley Memorial Church, in the centre of Oxford. If you are travelling by car you should use the Park and Ride, as the roads into Oxford are slow and confusing and parking is expensive. The church is a short walk from the train and bus stations.
To find out more about the Methodist Heritage in Oxford, have a look at the Wesleys Oxford website.
How the hunt came to be written
I am a member of Oxford Phab Club, a social club for people of all abilities, which is based at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in Central Oxford. We are always looking for new ideas for things to do and over the years have done several Treasure Hunts around Oxford City Centre, for example the paper based treasure hunt we did in June 2015. We were looking for another hunt go to on the programme for the summer of 2017, and I found an App for Android and iPhone devices called Huntzz, which had an inexpensive (£1.79 at the time of writing this post, I think it was about that in 2017 too) paid Treasure Hunt around Oxford City Centre available. I downloaded the app, bought the Oxford Hunt and tried it, and on July 7th 2017 several Phab members did the same, with reasonable success. I had a family event that night, so was unable to participate, so the event is not recorded on the Phab website.
Through much of 2016 members of the congregation of Wesley Memorial, joined by other people with connection to the church, rehearsed a musical called Amazing Love, written by Jack Godfrey. This was performed in February 2017, and some Oxford Phab members performed in it, while others went to see it. Through this I became interested in the lives of the Wesleys, and their time at Oxford, tying it into my interest in family history when I wrote a post about Amazing Love, Demographics and Mass migrations.
I had noticed that the Huntzz app allowed a user to create their own Hunt, and felt it would be good to try, taking inspiration from the Wesleys in Oxford walking tour leaflet already available in the church. The Huntzz app authors encourage charities to create their own Hunts, and were very helpful and supportive. I also like a business model I can understand, where they sell Hunts at a good value price, as opposed to, for example offering something for ‘free’ where they make their money through intrusive advertising in the app, or selling your personal information. I produced the ‘Wesley Walk in Oxford’ hunt for fun, but if you feel inclined to support either Wesley Memorial’s Open Doors project, or Oxford Phab donations would be very welcome.
Although John Wesley may not have actually said
it expresses the values which drive many of the activities of the church, so I have tried, in the “scroll” or guide entries, to link the historical sites on the Hunt to current activities.
Boots the Chemists
Somewhere which is not on the trail, but has an interesting John Wesley connection is Boots the Chemists. John Boot, who started selling remedies from a shop in Hoxton, had learned some of his skills from the book Primitive Physic by John Wesley, and was a ardent Methodist.