The Story Of Guernsey

The original award-winning 1978 museum design mirrored the octagonal plan of the Candie Gardens bandstand and for the most part the building is a series of linked octagonal pavillions. Our main series of permanent displays interpreting the natural and human history of Guernsey occupies three of these octagons, roughly divided by subject area.

Interactive panorama: courtesy of VisitGuernsey. More panoramas...

The museum's archaeological collections are particularly strong, reflecting not only the dedicated collecting of the Lukis family and those that followed but also the long and rich history of human activity in the islands. It is fitting then for the first partof the story to reflect this with an impressive array of finds from the neolithic onwards. The centrepiece of the display is an iron age warrior figure, fully dressed and equiped, developed from research on excavated burials at Guernsey's Kings Road site.

The remaining two octagons deal with the physical history of the island - its geology and natural history - and the more recent social history of its inhabitants. In terms of physical history, Guernsey is no stranger to sea-level change and the evidence for this can be seen at various places around the island in terms of both raised beaches and submerged peat beds. A large scale graphic panel in this area highlights the 'fossil' cliff line formed during a high sea-level phase many thousands of years ago and now a distinctive landscape feature parallel to the island's west coast. The natural history displays focus on some of the features of the flora and fauna which make the island special, especially the species at the northern limits of their range and which don't occur in the UK.

The social history displays distill the essential aspects of nearly 1000 years of human occupation into a storyline which explains how Guernsey came to be associated with the British crown and subsequently developed into the relatively prosperous community of today.

One object in the archaeology area - a barbed and tanged flint arrowhead from Les Fouillages megalithic tomb, Guernsey - is among the items we have included in our contribution to the British Museum / BBC A History of the World Project.