Horsham Museum

I'd never been to Horsham before last week. It has a museum, and here are some photos of it. It's an unusually heterogeneous collection of bits and pieces, some vaguely organised, others apparently randomly crammed together into display cases overflowing with a variety of old tat. 

I'm not sure you get much of a picture of how Horsham and its history have developed, but you do get the delightfully bizarre conjunctions and juxtapositions that so often characterise local museums. 

And you can't go wrong with a Victorian apothecary's cabinet.

There are also some strange collections of objects the Museum has acquired for different reasons: a selection of ethnographic material looted from different bits of the world by imperial travellers, and a variety of horse furniture displayed as though it was in a jeweller's shop.

Finally there are a couple of flashes of very imaginative display work. The Museum has a Cabinet of Curiosities ...

... a selection of antique shoes each in its own drawer ...

... and lastly and most beautifully, a wonderful shrine to the poet Shelley, whose family lived nearby, with a selection of books looking for all the world like strange butterflies about to take off.