Portsmouth Museum

Portsmouth Museum is the city's principal civic museum, housed in a handsome Victorian building on Museum Road in Old Portsmouth close to the Cathedral. As the flagship of Portsmouth's network of museums and galleries, it brings together an outstanding collection of fine art, decorative arts, local and social history, and material culture that tells the story of this uniquely significant naval city from prehistoric times to the present day.

Portsmouth has a remarkable literary heritage, and the museum celebrates two of its most famous sons: Charles Dickens, born in the city in 1812, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who practised as a doctor in Southsea in the 1880s while writing his first Sherlock Holmes stories. The Dickens Gallery explores the novelist's Portsmouth childhood and his relationship with the city that shaped his imagination, while the Conan Doyle connection is explored through the stories' origins and the character he created here on the Southsea seafront.

The fine art collection is one of the strongest in the south of England outside London. It encompasses works spanning several centuries, with particular strengths in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, British portraits, and 20th-century British art. The decorative arts holdings are equally distinguished, including important collections of English pottery, glass, silver and furniture that reflect both local patronage and national taste.

The story of Portsmouth itself — as a naval base, as a garrison town, as a working-class city with a proud identity — is told through the social history galleries with intelligence and humanity. The experiences of ordinary Portsmouth residents through wars, industrial change, bombing during the Blitz, and the post-war rebuilding of the city are documented through objects, photographs and oral histories.

Portsmouth Museum is the ideal starting point for any exploration of the city's rich and layered heritage, providing context for visits to the historic dockyard, Southsea Castle, and the many other heritage sites that make Portsmouth one of England's most historically significant cities.