The development of a Vacuum-UV (VUV) multichannel recording spectrometer for laser plasma spectroscopy is described. The instrument covers the spectral region 30 - 325nm and complements an existing Extreme-UV (EUV) system covering the 5 - 50nm range. It is based on an Acton Research Corporation (ARC) VM-521 lm normal incidence vacuum spectrometer fitted with a 1024 element VUV linear array detector. The array detector comprises of a Galileo VUV-25R Channel Electron Multiplier Array (CEMA), butt-coupled to an EG&G Optical Multi-channel Analyser (OMA) system. The complete set-up was tested using spectra from laser produced plasmas of polyethylene Selected spectral lines were chosen to illustrate the system performance with respect to resolution, signal to noise ratio etc and compared with both computed and manufacturer stated performance. Potential resolution enhancement using deconvolution procedures is illustrated by preliminary results. This thesis concludes with a brief description of future work on system optimisation and future applications.