In March 2018 Portsmouth City Council was awarded a £79,700 grant to deliver the ‘Wild about Portsmouth’ project, aimed at raising the profile of the city’s Natural, History Collection, which had been without a curator for over 10 years.
The project has enabled the development of natural history advocates and a team of volunteers to work on and promote the collection, as well as engaging with people in a variety of ways, from family activities to specialist workshops.
Since May 2018, work has been made to gain an overview of the collections, appoint volunteers and an assistant (starting in January 2019) and sharing newly found collections knowledge with local and national societies.
The largest and most important collection is that amassed by HLF Guermonprez (1858-1924) who lived in Bognor Regis between 1892 - 1924. This collection was transferred to Portsmouth Museums in the 1970s where it is held in Trust.
HLF Guermonprez was an avid collector, and the scope of his collection certainly reflects his enthusiasm for Natural History. He confined most of this collecting to Bognor Regis and the counties of West and East Sussex, recording where and when he found each specimen. Although some of his work is mentioned in publications such as the Flora of Sussex (1937) and the occasional entomological journal, many of Guermonprez’s collections remain under recorded.
Sussex biological specimens held in Portsmouth’s Museums
Plants
There are about 9,000 plants collected by Guermonprez in the herbarium. To date 3142 have been identified as collected from Sussex. Other collections with Sussex specimens include the A W Westrup Herbarium, which contains 153 sheets of plants from Sussex, and the John Jenkins Herbarium.
Entomology Collection
The majority of the collection are Lepidoptera and mainly from the Guermonprez Collection. Work has started on cataloguing the moth collection and a first analysis of the 561 records forwarded to Bob Foreman has shown ‘new spots on the map’. It is hoped that once the new ‘Insect Room’ is up and running, the moths and their data can be checked and added to the moth records for Sussex.
Taxidermy
There are about 800 taxidermy specimens in the Guermonprez Collection. Of these 116 are birds listed as being from Sussex over a date range of 1851 - 1925. The specimens from the mid-19th century, although part of the Guermonprez Collection, were previously in the Knight Collection. There are also a few small mammals collected in West Sussex.
Access to the Collections
At present the herbarium is the easiest collection to access and volunteers have been the key to organising the collection into taxonomic order. The insect collections are currently awaiting relocation so that they can be accessed more easily. They will be moved to their new location by the end of January 2019 and, once in place, it is hoped to appoint entomology volunteers to work through the insect collections and catalogue them.
By the end of the project in 2010 it is anticipated that the collections will be more readily available for consultation. Cataloguing projects will be driven by data requests and national recording schemes so that data can be shared more efficiently.
To arrange a visit to view the collections please contact the Curator of Natural History, Christine Taylor by email Christine.taylor@portsmouthcc.gov.uk
Christine Taylor
Curator of Natural History, Portsmouth Museums
