Visitors to Stella Mitchell's amazing museum are warned that the experience is guaranteed to make them feel old.

Stella has spent the last 27 years scouring jumble and car boot sales, charity shops and flea markets for 20th Century memorabilia.

She has even climbed into roadside rubbish skips to find items she believes are far too important to end up being buried in holes in the ground.

The result is a walk down memory lane at her Rejectamenta museum, near Chichester, devoted to good old-fashioned nostalgia.

On display are tens of thousands of items which bring back memories and amaze a modern generation bred with computers, mobile phones and digital television.

There are wringers, used when clothes were washed by hand, small-screen TV sets which showed black and white programmes, and children's toys worked by imagination, not batteries.

The museum features 26 themed displays devoted to the way we worked, lived and relaxed during the early 20th Century.

Exhibits range from domestic appliances to an early toilet pan and from a Twenties dentist's chair to a liberty bodice.

Many displays chart changes in fashions from the uniform worn by a 1934 "Nippy," a waitress who worked in Lyon's tea houses, to the swinging Sixties and the hippie era.

A section devoted to the impact on pop music of The Beatles features mop-top wigs, jackets and jigsaw puzzles. The TV section looks at shows like Criss Cross Quiz, whose prizes now look paltry compared with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Crazes that have gripped the nation over the years range from winklepickers and platform shoes to spacehoppers and Rubik's Cubes.

Big stars' replies to fan mail include charming letters sent by Bing Crosby and Gilbert Harding, one of the BBC's first big television stars who was renowned for being grumpy on-screen.

The souvenirs on sale at Rejectamenta are really different. For example, The Wombles' BBC annual for 1976 and a mint condition 1960 LP featuring Adam Faith (a snip at £6).

Stella opened her first museum in a redundant church near Chichester but she needed more space. Now she is based in a cleverly-converted former glasshouse at Earnley Gardens, Earnley.

A building within a building has been created to ensure the sun cannot fade and wreck the exhibits. Special measures have also been taken against insects and moths.

Stella, who began collecting when she was an art student in the Midlands, says nostalgia is a very easy emotion to communicate.

She said: "You have only got to look at something that was familiar when you were young and it evokes memories of the days when life was perhaps a lot less complicated and much cosier."

Stella likes to add a touch of atmosphere for visitors. Most days, she opens for business with hairstyle, make-up and clothes from her favourite era, the Forties. She is still adding to her collection and hires out packages to schools, colleges and theatre companies.

Rejectamenta is at Earnley Gardens, Earnley, Chichester, open daily from 10am to 6pm until the end of October.