Entering Causeway House you come into the sixteenth century entrance hall, added to the original medieval dwelling and modernised with new plaster work and bay windows in the early 1700s. The fine wainscoting and oak panelling feature the date 1567. Today the Entrance Hall is the Museum’s Visitor Information Centre.

The Georgian Room is one of the newest parts of Causeway House, built in the late sixteenth century. The owners of the house in the early eighteenth century transformed the room into one more in keeping with the tastes of the Georgian period, adding a bay window, covering up the timbers with plaster and building a new fireplace.

The room features the original 1670s refectory table. In two modern display cases there is a selection of items used for eating and serving food. The room also displays part of the Museum’s portrait collection.

This gallery is contemporary with the Georgian Room and is decorated with wood panelling. The Museum’s main temporary exhibitions are displayed here, generally four per year.

To the rear of the Hall is the ‘Discover the District’ gallery, featuring panels on noteworthy villages, places and sights in the Horsham District, including a changing display on some aspect of District life and culture.

As a country market town, Horsham’s lifeblood has been farming and shopping. Featuring original packaging and trade signs, bill heads and accounts used by shops, the two large Edwardian display cases show the way shop goods and retailers have changed between the Victorian era and the 1960s. Horsham Museum is fortunate to have the fixtures and fittings from ‘Williams & Smith,’ a chemist shop formerly found on West Street, which have been set up in the gallery. Although the drug drawers are Victorian, they were still in use until the shop closed in the early 1970s.

The display uses original windows, door, padlock and keys from Horsham gaol, built in 1775; these come together to form a room setting that shows what prison clothes and a typical cell would have looked like. Accounts of various crimes and punishments from documents in the Museum’s archives provide some fascinating stories. Two mementoes of one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, the Acid Bath Murders, are also on display. The murderer, John Haigh, was held in a Horsham police cell before his pre-trial hearing. The Museum has his cell door and a comb that he used in the prison hospital at Lewes.

This gallery displays a number of kitchen items and features the remains of a medieval fireplace discovered during the renovation of the area. The gardening element of the gallery is portrayed in a small display of a gardener’s potting shed, with objects ranging from a seventeenth century watering can to 1950s seed packets. The gallery also displays pottery and porcelain spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and features Capability Brown’s design for Horsham’s lost stately home, Hills Place.

The local Wealden iron industry was once a vital part of the local economy, providing much English iron in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little now remains of this industry, although the hammer ponds to the east of Horsham still survive as a local amenity. The display features a range of iron objects, including firebacks and a small cannon.

William Albery was the last in a line of saddlers going back to his great-grandfather, trading from 49 West Street, Horsham. He also developed a keen interest in history, collecting examples of the saddler’s art and craft, as well as a fantastic collection of bridle bits, from the 1920s onwards. He gave his collection to the town and when his son gave up the trade in the 1960s, the Museum acquired the family papers and shop items enabling a setting to be created to display a small part of his collection.

This small gallery stages a series of temporary exhibitions throughout the year, featuring both photographs from the Museum’s extensive photographic archives and the work of local photographers. Please see our temporary exhibitions programme to see what’s on at the current time.

This reconstruction of a wheelwright’s shop is based around the tools and equipment donated to the Museum by the Piper family of Southwater. The display features items such as a wheelspanner, bridle, rounder, stail engine, and a lathe.