From huntin', shootin' and fishin' origins to wildlife conservation today, the Booth Hall Natural History Museum is an asset to the city and its people

This delightful film from 1990 shows the ongoing work of Brighton's Booth Hall Natural History Museum. Located in Dyke Road, the museum, which in 1990 was celebrating its centenary, began as a Victorian collection of stuffed birds displayed in dioramas that tried to provide more authentic representations of the bird's natural habitat. This mode of working has continued to the present, though in modern times, the emphasis is on conservation and the preservation of wildlife, both locally and further afield. Using interviews with the museum's director, Ed Jarzembowski, its geologist, John Cooper and its resident taxidermist, Jeremy Adams, the programme shows the various ways the museum engages with and becomes part of the local community with volunteer schemes and outreach to local schools. We see children out on geological field trips and attending 'handling sessions' in the museum as well as two girls donating a dead raptor to the taxidermist. These specimens find a later use by the local community as teaching aids. We also see how a volunteer liaises with Lavender Jones, a planner with Brighton Council on producing an ecological map of the region so that any future development takes wildlife and ecological issues into consideration. The programme highlights how the museum has developed into an asset for both the local community and Brighton & Hove Council rather than existing solely as an institution.

The Booth Museum of Natural History, now a Grade II listed building, remains on its original site on Dyke Road in the City of Brighton & Hove. Founded in 1874 by the collector, naturalist and hunter, Edward Thomas Booth, the museum was re-opened in 1891 under civic ownership after it was donated by its owner to the town, as it then was, the year before. Today the museum is part of ‘Royal Pavilions and Museums, Brighton & Hove' and claims to depict an A to Z of the natural world – in its own words ‘from Ants to Zebras, Azaleas to Zooplankton'. The museum's extensive collection of bird dioramas, insects, butterflies and geological specimens was augmented in 2020 with the discovery of an unknown species of pterosaur, or flying reptile, amongst its fossil collections. Hidden in a drawer since the 19th century, the item was originally mis-identified as the skeletal remains of a shark's fin.