Booth Museum of Natural History

The Booth Museum of Natural History stands in Brighton, a city on England’s south coast. It is a municipal museum owned by the local council and run as a charitable trust. The building houses natural history collections with a strong Victorian focus. Edward Thomas Booth opened it in 1874 after years of collecting British birds. His dioramas recreated birds in lifelike settings using habitat backgrounds. The museum later became part of the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust. The museum is worth visiting for its exceptional Victorian taxidermy displays. Booth aimed to collect every British bird species, including males, females, juveniles and variations. His dioramas were pioneering in Britain and remain intact under the terms of his 1890 donation. The collection now includes over 700,000 insects and 73,000 vertebrate specimens. Notable additions came from collectors like Sir Alexander Crichton and Arthur Hall. In 2020 a new pterosaur species was found among the fossils. Visitors find rows of glass-fronted cases filled with taxidermied birds in recreated landscapes. The skeleton room displays bones from around the world, including a massive orca found on Brighton beach in 1935. Victorian curiosities such as a hoax merman sit alongside drawers of butterflies. A recent addition is the ‘Life in the Garden’ diorama, the first new one since 1932. The displays still follow Booth’s original vision of natural settings.