Booth Museum of Natural History
The Booth museum is just down the road from were I live – it’s a Brighton institution – The collection housed in the museum is an extensive array of British birds from the 19th century, all housed in mini dioramas. Edward Booth built the museum in 1874 and bequeathed the museum and collection to the local authority in 1890. I took my Holga down there the other day and took these shots:
Booth Museum, Brighton
Booth Museum, Brighton
Booth Museum, Brighton
Booth Museum, Brighton
Eric Gill, a onetime Brighton resident, used to visit the museum when he was a child. Here is an exert from the biography ‘Eric Gill’ by Fiona MacCarthy:
There were many opportunities in Brighton for Ruskinian self-improvement. Just around the corner from the Gill’s, in Dyke road, stood the Booth Bird Museum (known in the Gill household as the birds’ museum, since the children imagined it belonging to the hundreds of stuffed birds displayed within it, Warbles and Buzzards and Bitterns).
The Booth museum was and still is an extraordinary monument to Victorian enthusiasm, the urge to collect and collate. Edward Booth, who formed the collection, was a wealthy man whose preoccupation with birds approached mania: he once kept a train under steam in Brighton station for a week waiting to rush him to the highlands as soon as his gillies had informed him that the white-tailed eagles were nesting.
(I had no idea what a ‘gillie’ was so I looked it up – here’s the definition from dictionary.com: ‘a male attendant or personal servant to a Highland chieftain.’)
I recently found out from the Brighton Prestonville blog the sad news that the opening hours were being reduced because of cuts in public spending, a situation that would be hard to revert. You can read more about the situation and find out how to help here.
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You’re currently reading “Booth Museum of Natural History,” an entry on 20three
- Published:
- 1.21.10 / 2pm
- Category:
- Art, Brighton, Outsider, Photography, op
- Tags:
- birds, Brighton, Diorama, holga, museum, Photography, taxidermy, toy camera, victoriana, wildlife
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