Sometimes, we found the most fun in the smallest of our discoveries. This happened to us on a warm summer day when we visited the fantastic Anna’s Museum in Brighton.
To find this small Museum, you have to take a turn next to Churchill Square and walk a little further to see where this street leads. This side street helped us escape the crowds of people who came to Brighton over the sunny weekend.
You will find this window filled with small items. The items displayed there easily grab your attention, and of course, we ended up spending some time going through everything presented at Anna’s Museum.
But this is not a proper museum. You shouldn’t expect to see one in the traditional sense of the word. This feels like a cabinet of curiosities open to the public but hidden from plain sight—something that you could see in a movie but never in real life—like a modern Kunstkabinett, as the Germans say.
But it’s for real, and we have the pictures as proof.
In Brighton, Anna’s Museum is the work of a young natural history collector who has been collecting items and things since she was 4 years old. A few years later, she got into taxidermy and eventually became Brighton’s youngest taxidermist.
By her teens, her collection was already impressive, and her parents helped her present her collection of natural history artifacts on a shop window. This is where you can walk up nowadays and look at hand-labeled glass jars and wooden boxes filled with rocks, eggs, bones, fossils, and more.
There is even a squirrel wearing a waistcoat and holding an egg. We are not sure about the story there, but it looks classy. We read online that this piece is called Squirrel Nutkins!
It feels great to see somebody like Anna getting all this support from her family. When I was growing up, I used to collect rocks, and her story seems too familiar to me.
I never got close to the quality and quantity of objects she has here, from skulls to feathers and rocks and anywhere else. This is why I decided to write this short article about it.
To visit Anna’s Museum in Brighton, follow the map below. Don’t forget that the window is the museum; you don’t need to knock on the door or do anything else. Pay attention to the windows; you’d be forgiven for ignoring them and thinking the Museum is some hip window display.
We also found this 2012 interview with Anna and her family, which you might need. If you like this small cabinet of curiosities as much as we did, you need to read it.
Anna’s Museum – A Secret Window Museum filled with curiosities in Brighton
44 Upper North Street, Brighton BN1 3FH
www.annasmuseum.org
