About Project Time Machine

In 2024 Littlehampton Museum was awarded a National Lottery ‘Unlocking Collections’ grant to fund a brand-new community project, putting YOU at the heart of the Museum Service.  

This exciting new phase in the Museum’s life, is known as ‘Project Time Machine’. Phase one, which is now complete consisted of two parts, read on for more details…

The project blasted off with a large public consultation asking YOU what you wanted from YOUR museum.

We wanted to hear the views of as many people as possible, both visitors and non-visitors, to learn how the Museum’s collections could be used to engage and represent the whole community.  The results are now in and can be found in full here.

Findings were reported to the Town Council's Community Resources Committee on the 2nd October, minutes of this meeting can be found here.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this exciting phase of the Museum’s development, your suggestions will feed into our future plans.

From October 2024 to June 2025, our team of volunteers worked in the Museum's Hearne Gallery cataloguing and researching our social history collections. The team captured rich new context, and established links between objects, local people, places and events. Some hidden histories were revealed! 

⭐⭐⭐⭐New Exhibition⭐⭐⭐⭐

Jump aboard the Time Machine, travel back through the ages and explore Littlehampton’s past through the Museum’s social history collections!

Shaped by the Museum volunteer's experiences of working on Project Time Machine and featuring their selection of objects, this exhibition includes many of the ‘star’ items and hidden histories unveiled during their research, alongside some objects found to be less relevant to Littlehampton's history! A selection of the research packs produced by volunteers for the project are also on display for visitors to browse and find out more about objects, people and places. 

This fun exhibition encourages all members of the family to interact with the time machine – what date would you travel back to and why?  What should the Museum collect in the future? Can you review a museum object and decide if it is relevant to Littlehampton’s history (or not!). 

A HUGE thank you to everyone who participated in this important new project, we cant wait to see where the Time Machine takes us!