While work is progressing on the museum's roof, one of the several galleries being refreshed during our closed period is the current Ethnography gallery.
Horsham museum is home to an exotic collection of objects. best known are Japanese objects brought back as souvenirs by the Hendersons of Sedgwick Park in the 1800s, which have been on display in our Ethnography gallery.
Upon the reopening of the museum this gallery will be enhanced to feature objects and stories from more of Horsham’s travellers and explorers, including Frederick DuCane Godman of South Lodge, who created the famous encyclopaedia of Central America’s fauna and flora and was a significant collector of birds, insects, books and ceramics. The Henderson’s interesting objects will remain, and the historically significant collection of photographs Emma Henderson assembled on her grand tour of Asia and America in 1874 will be redisplayed in a new digital format.
Meanwhile the wider collection of ethnographical material housed at Horsham Museum is being reviewed. Much of it has little or no provenance, so the significance either to Horsham or to the culture of origin are unclear. Understanding these collections is a challenge, but doing so is necessary before they can be displayed, stored correctly or rehomed as appropriate. This process is taking place as part of the rationalisation project, in which our team are going through the museum’s overloaded storage areas and streamlining the collection to make sure everything sits within our collections policy and can be stored and displayed safely for years to come.
As part of this redisplay, the adjoining gallery will be redisplayed to focus on the discoveries and inventions made in Horsham during the Victorian period. Keep an eye out for details coming soon.
Published: 20 Oct 2026