Cabinet of Curiosities

Samworth Academy
have a 'Wonder Room' full of curiosities and puzzles. See Guardian report (May 2011) here

Horsham Museum
Horsham Museum has a cabinet of curiosities to display some of their collection
and to use as a focus for their work with local schools. See a slideshow here

They have also included "the strange, the magical and the inexplicable"
- a unicorn horn, a five-legged pig and a mummified cat....

The museum is at 9 Causeway, Horsham, RH12 1HE Tel: 01403 254959

Sir John Soane's Museum

If you imagine a cabinet of curiosities expanded to take over a whole house and then the houses next door
- you would have Sir John Soane's houses in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
He eventually built a facade across all three houses and opened them as a museum.

The houses combine a kind of gothic sensibility for unusual and 'awkward' spaces,
with Sir John's preference for classical ornamentation and sculpture.
The museum has a web-site at http://www.soane.org/

More pictures of cabinets and early museums

A cabinet made by Philip Hainhoffer and presented to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632.
The cabinet contained a mixture of artificial and natural wonders not only in its contents,
but also in the construction of the cabinet itself, as this close-up reveals:

Sir Ashton Lever's museum, London (after Sarah Stone 1760-1844) -

Some children viewing a cabinet -

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