Today I’m excited to share a Brighton tour with a twist of one of my favourite museums in Brighton I discovered while researching my guidebook to the city, Secret Brighton.
This Brighton guided tour takes you behind the scenes of the quirky Booth Museum, a hidden cabinet of curiosities on the fringes of the stylish hilltop neighbourhood of Seven Dials.
This discovery was particularly exciting for me, because not only do I love visiting museum collections, but I also find it so much fun visiting them inside out – that is, to take a backstage tour of what museums don’t display, going behind the ‘private’ door signs into their secret stores. In most cases, these are much larger than what is actually on display.
A backstage tour of the Booth Museum, Brighton’s very own natural history collection, is the ultimate chance to go behind the ‘private: staff only’ signs and raid all those backstage drawers and cabinets, packed with no less than one million objects relating to the natural world.
Tours are peppered with anecdotes about the collection and the museum’s founder, Edward Booth, an eccentric affluent Victorian. He was a man with a serious ambition – to exhibit an example of every species of British bird.
Once he achieved his goal, he started collecting species from all around the world – from birds of paradise to parrots, even returning a Dodo skeleton. Let’s not forget the 525,000 insects and 50,000 minerals and rocks… He collected so much that he had no choice but to start the museum in 1874 to house it all.
A wander around takes you up above the main museum, along darkened, creaky corridors lined with sets of old wooden drawers and cupboards crammed with butterflies, bugs, bones, eggs, shells and cupboards dedicated entirely to fossils, minerals and rocks.
Not to mention all the taxidermy birds and skeletons… It’s everything that doesn’t fit into the museum, plus other specimens which have been donated over the years, a lot of it illegal to collect now.
After seeing this lot, you could assume that the Booth Museum likes to hoard things, but of course, it’s not all just sitting there gathering dust. The Booth Museum’s collections are special resources.
They allow the museum to make unique contributions to answering significant scientific questions and play a vital role in advancing scientific knowledge, addressing societal issues, and increasing scientific literacy.
Fun fact: The Booth Museum of Natural History is known as the home of the ‘diorama’ – that is, it was the first of its kind to display birds in their natural habitat. It’s an idea since copied all over the world and perfected by the likes of the Smithsonian in Washington and NYC’s Museum of Natural History.
Intrigued? Book your guided backstage tour of the Booth Museum in Brighton here. Find out more on page 248 of my bestselling guidebook, Secret Brighton.
(The best photos in this post are by Lyndsey Haskell)
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