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| Established | 1893 |
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| Location | Causeway House, Horsham |
| Type | Heritage centre |
| Curator | Nikki Caxton |
| Website | Horsham Museum |
Horsham Museum is a museum at Horsham, West Sussex, in South East England. [1] It was founded in August 1893 by volunteers of the Free Christian (now Unitarian) Church and became part of Horsham District Council in 1974. It is a fully accredited museum and serves both Horsham and its district with the support of the Friends of Horsham Museum and an active volunteer base.
Horsham Museum has been situated in Causeway House since 1941, but prior to that the collections found a home in the basement of Park House, North Street. The museum occupies the entirety of the Causeway House site. In addition to the displays, the museum collections also feature:
Archive The archive building was constructed to hold the Albery collection and other documents from the town's manuscript collections.
Library The Curator's Library has over 2,000 books on the museum's collections and can be consulted upon request.
Garden The museum garden was, until 1981, a derelict area after many years of neglect. A project run by the Horsham Museum Society (now Friends of Horsham Museum) led by Sylvia Standing was developed to restore the garden to a fit state. In 2007 the team won the Community Services Gold Award in the Horsham in Bloom Floral Display competition, recognition of the hard work put into the garden throughout the year. [2] Edward Bainbridge Copnall's 10-foot-tall (3.0 m) sculpture of the Crucifixion of Jesus, made of coal dust and resin, was installed in St John's Church, Broadbridge Heath, Horsham, in 1964, but was removed in December 2008 to Horsham Museum. [3] [4]
The museum has a large and varied collection arranged in 18 galleries. It has a significant collection of books and memorabilia relating to the Warnham-born poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), including many early editions of his works and that of his second wife Mary Shelley (1797–1851). It also possesses original letters and books relating to the wider Shelley circle.
The Horsham Museum owns a number of prints by local artist John Guille Millais (1865–1931). They also have a significant sculpture by Millais of fighting game birds that is now on permanent display.
Other collections include ceramics, ethnography, local Sussex trades and industries, working life, geology, archaeology, bicycles, and horses. A particular feature of the museum's collections is the Archive of documents relating to Horsham and its history, including the collection of William Albery. [5]
In 2011 the Friends of Horsham Museum were awarded a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund to conserve and promote the museum's extensive poster collection.
Amberley Museum is an open-air industrial heritage museum at Amberley, near Arundel in West Sussex, England. The museum is owned and operated by Amberley Museum and Heritage Centre, a not-for-profit company and registered charity, and has the support of an active Friends organisation. The items in the Museums collection are held by The Amberley Museum Trust
The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a museum founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme and opened in 1922. The Lady Lever Art Gallery is set in the garden village of Port Sunlight, on the Wirral and one of the National Museums Liverpool.
Broadbridge Heath is a village and civil parish in the Horsham district of West Sussex, England. It is about two miles (3 km) west from the historic centre of Horsham. The population of Broadbridge Heath has increased considerably in the first two decades of the twenty-first century because of large scale housing development.
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery is a museum and art gallery located in, Hastings, East Sussex, England. Established in 1892, it originally resided in the Brassey Institute, but moved to its current location in 1927. As of 2019 it had around 97,000 objects of local history, natural sciences, fine and decorative arts, and world cultures.
Horsham is a market town on the upper reaches of the River Arun on the fringe of the Weald in West Sussex, England. The town is 31 miles (50 km) south south-west of London, 18.5 miles (30 km) north-west of Brighton and 26 miles (42 km) north-east of the county town of Chichester. Nearby towns include Crawley to the north-east and Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill to the south-east. It is the administrative centre of the Horsham district.
Warnham is a village and civil parish in the Horsham district of West Sussex, England. The village is centred 2 miles (3.2 km) north-northwest of Horsham, 31 miles (50 km) from London, to the west of the A24 road. The parish is in the north-west of the Weald.
Rising Universe, more commonly known locally as the Shelley Fountain, was a large kinetic water sculpture in Horsham, West Sussex, England. It was created by the sculptor Angela Conner and installed in 1996 to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was born near Horsham. Conner refers to the work by the name Cosmic Cycle, which is the name originally attached to the work on a brass plaque. The fountain was dismantled and removed from its location in the town centre in June 2016 after district councillors voted that it had "reached the end of its serviceable life".
Castle Goring is a Grade I listed country house in Worthing, in West Sussex, England about 4.5 miles northwest of the town centre.
Barnet Museum is in the London Borough of Barnet. It has displays on topics including the Battle of Barnet, Barnet Fair and Barnet Market. It is a centre for local and family research and its archives, library and reference collection are available for use by members of the public.
Henry Weekes was an English sculptor, best known for his portraiture. He was among the most successful British sculptors of the mid-Victorian period.
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, having opened in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is one of the largest museums in the country. The museum had 525,144 visitors in 2021, an increase of 34 percent from 2020 but still well below pre- COVID-19 pandemic levels. In 2021 it ranked 50th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.
Jon Edgar is a British sculptor of the Frink School. Improvisation is an important part of his reductive working process and developed from the additive working process of Alan Thornhill. Final works are often autobiographical, perhaps referencing anxieties or pre-occupations at the time. His body of work includes many clay portrait sketches of eminent sitters.
John Guille Millais was a British artist, naturalist, gardener and travel writer who specialised in wildlife and flower portraiture. He travelled extensively around the world in the late Victorian period detailing wildlife often for the first time. He is noted for illustrations that are of a particularly exact nature.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
The History of Horsham, a market town on the upper reaches of the River Arun on the fringe of the Weald in West Sussex, England, can be traced back to 947 AD, and there is evidence of earlier settlement.
George Bax Holmes was an English fossil collector. Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Horsham, Sussex, he was the discoverer of the 'Great Horsham Iguanodon'. Having started life pursuing a medical career he was able to devote more time to his fossil hunting from 1834. It was in that year that his father died and left him considerable property interests. As early as 1836 he contributed to Howard Dudley's history of Horsham with a paragraph on his work.
Thomas Medwin was an early 19th-century English writer, poet and translator. He is known chiefly for his biography of his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for published recollections of his friend, Lord Byron.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Horsham Unitarian Church is a Unitarian chapel in Horsham in the English county of West Sussex. It was founded in 1719 to serve the large Baptist population of the ancient market town of Horsham—home of radical preacher Matthew Caffyn—and the surrounding area. The chapel's congregation moved towards Unitarian beliefs in the 19th century, but the simple brick building continued to serve worshippers drawn from a wide area of Sussex. It is one of several places of worship which continue to represent Horsham's centuries-old tradition of Protestant Nonconformism, and is the town's second oldest surviving religious building—only St Mary's, the parish church, predates it. English Heritage has listed the chapel at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.
The Eden Valley Museum is a local history museum in the market town of Edenbridge, Kent in England. The museum is housed within a Grade II* listed medieval farmhouse. The museum holds notable collections demonstrating the history of cricket ball making, tanning as well as archaeology and an extensive archive of local information. The museum is also notable as the home of a needlework box made by a German POW during World War Two. The box was featured as part of the BBC's 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' project.
Semmens, Jason., Horsham Museum Guidebook (Horsham: Horsham District Council, 2011)