Booth Museum of Natural History

About

Booth Museum of Natural History is a charitable trust-managed, municipally owned museum of natural history in the city of Brighton and Hove in the South East of England. Its focus is on Victorian taxidermy, especially of British birds, as well as collections focusing on entomology (especially lepidoptera), chalk fossils, skeletons and botany. It is part of "Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust". Admission to the museum is free.

The Booth Museum was opened in 1874 by naturalist and collector Edward Thomas Booth. Booth was particularly interested in birds, and it was his ambition, though not fully realized, to collect examples of every bird species found in Britain. Each species collected would include a male, a female, a juvenile and any plumage variations. He presented his bird collection in Victorian-style dioramas that attempted to recreate how birds would appear in the setting of their natural habitat. An example in Booth's own notes describe the Gannet diorama as being 'copied from a sketch [of] the North side of the Bass Rock'. Booth was one of the pioneers of such diorama displays, and his museum, the first to present its collection in this manner in Britain, influenced...