(Above) Fragments of Mortaria, a Roman mortar and pestle and a pot hanger found at Chilgrove Villa in Sussex
Museum: Chichester District Museum, Little London, Chichester
At the entrance to Chichester District Museum, the Alex Down Miller gallery appears to be a modestly-sized display of local geology, full of Mesolithic picks, paleolithic hand axes, flaxes and Bronze Age weapons found in the surrounding Sussex hills and commons.
There's a tusk of a young Ice Age woolly mammoth, antlers from red deer, teeth from saw fish and sharks, turtle shells and, perhaps most intriguingly, a Bronze Age metal hoard found in 1993, adjoined to the Petworth Hoard of more than 100 Roman coins.
The head in the Alec Down Miller gallery may have belonged to Emperor Trajan
A large fragment of a Roman mosaic takes centre stage, while the marble head of a Roman colossal statue depicting the head of a 2nd century emperor lurks nearby, the alien treasure of a Bosham courtyard.
There's such an impressive haul here that it feels voyeuristic – there are chimney pots from the town’s Medieval market period and bowls, cups, spoons and knives used by Romans.
A fragment of a Roman mosaic lies at the centre of the opening room
Makeup was particularly popular for them, so much so that a guide book leads you through enough tweezers, nail picks, scoops and mirrors to prick the vanity of any 21st century beauty consultant.
But it's upstairs, reached via an unpromising staircase, which provides the greatest surprises.
Many of the adverts and propaganda cartoons in The Wartime Scrapbook have been turned into posters
It starts innocuously enough, offering a brief nod to the civil war of the 17th century, followed by a room almost the size of the downstairs gallery devoted to the museum's proposed switch to a more modern space on the city's Tower Street in 2011.
You pass a concise account of the Georgian period en route to a staircase heading down. Then, without warning, the displays sweeps off to the left, into a veritable playground of finely-preserved relics from Victorian Chichester.
The Cathedral spire collapsed in 1861, recalled in a black and white photo showing grim-faced clerks in top hats, standing uneasily among scaffolding manned by rag-clad builders on the crumbling icon.
A grind used to fill jars of Victorian paste
An ornate chair carved by a local doctor in 1880 looks invitingly comfy, fashioned with nearby tools, and a wartime scrapbook allows beaming pin-ups, jolly adverts and boundless propaganda to jostle like bestsellers in a kitsch poster shop.
Some of the machines on view make microwaves and dishwashers seem duller than ever, most notably a wooden refrigerator, a cog-driven metal grind used to fill jars of paste and a mangling machine used by an ironmonger’s which has long since departed, replaced by the sanitised whirr of a Tesco’s store.
The labels are pretty entertaining – a police truncheon known as a Life Preserver was "joined by a leather thong" in the mid-19th century, apparently making it "harder hitting".
Victorians relied on wooden refrigeratiors
William Blake's famous trial at the ancient Guildhall, in 1803, came after the poet and artist made "insulting and seditious" remarks in support of Napoleon's enemy forces as he "forcibly removed" a soldier from his garden.
Games of Skittles and Shove Ha'Penny – a pub game using coins and a wooden board in a kind of cross between darts and backgammon – are up for grabs on the way back, along with peep holes you can cop a feel through in a bid to identify mystery objects, one of which turns out to be an egg bottle.
This is a real tardis of a history centre. When it moves, the most pressing priority should be to maintain its abundant character.
