Brighton Museum

My journey back from West Malling last week took me on a detour to Brighton, mainly to visit Mad Hatters in Trafalgar Street as my old fedora is getting a bit rough after a few years, and I can only get the style I like there (they had none but have kindly offered to order one and post it on). I had lunch at a marvellous little greasy-spoon café and then visited the Museum with some bemusement that I'd never done so before. 

The building is part of the Pavilion complex and consequently is a bit nuts. Gorgeous encaustic tiles accompany you up a staircase at the rear of the grand central atrium, and on the upper floor Moorish arches open into vistas of distant galleries.

This is a big municipal museum and gallery, and one in a town with a distinctive personality. The displays are very eclectic and there is no coherent story, rather a collection of glittering fragments, but everything is sort-of there, from fishing boats to Prinny and his Regency pretensions, Mods and Rockers on 1960s beaches to a moving examination of contemporary trans identity. There are strong archaeology galleries, and rooms of global cultural artefacts put into human context rather well. We've already mentioned Paula Huntbach's 1980s Goth gear which occupies a place in a show about how gender and identity are expressed in niche clothing.

However I thought the crowning glory of the museum is that great central atrium, devoted to a ravishing collection of twentieth-century decorative art. It's a charismatic space, spectacularly rendered with some of the most sumptuous kit I've ever seen in a single museum gallery.