Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
The V&A is in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in an area known as "Albertopolis" because of its association with Prince Albert, the Albert Memorial, and the major cultural institutions with which he was associated. These include the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and Imperial College London. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As with other national British museums, entrance is free.
The V&A covers and 145 galleries. Its collection spans 5,000 years of art, from ancient history to the present day, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. However, the art of antiquity in most areas is not collected. The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewellery, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
The museum owns the world's largest collection of post-classical sculpture, with the holdings of Italian Renaissance sculpture being the largest outside Italy. The departments of Asia include art from South Asia, China, Japan, Korea and the Islamic world. The East Asian collections are among the best in Europe, with particular strengths in ceramics and metalwork, while the Islamic collection is amongst the largest in the Western world. Overall, it is one of the largest museums in the world.
Since 2001 the museum has embarked on a major £150m renovation programme. The new European galleries for the 17th century and the 18th century were opened on 9 December 2015. These restored the original Aston Webb interiors and host the European collections 1600–1815. The Young V&A in east London is a branch of the museum, and a new branch in London – V&A East – opened in May 2025. The first V&A museum outside London, V&A Dundee opened on 15 September 2018.
History
Foundation
The Victoria and Albert Museum has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Henry Cole was the museum's first director, and he was also involved in the planning. Initially the V&A was known as the Museum of Manufactures. The first opening to the general public was in May 1852 at Marlborough House. By September the collection had been transferred to Somerset House. At this stage, the collections covered both applied art and science. Several of the exhibits from the opening Exhibition were purchased by the museum to form the kernel of the V&A collection.By February 1854 discussions were underway to transfer the museum to the current site and the museum was renamed South Kensington Museum. In 1855 the German architect Gottfried Semper, at the request of Cole, produced a design for the museum, but it was rejected by the Board of Trade as too expensive. The current site was occupied by Brompton Park House, which was extended in 1857 to include the first refreshment rooms. The museum's café was the first in the world to provide a catering service for researchers and guests, and "the original 19th-century decór the Refreshment Rooms... remains largely intact."
The official opening by Queen Victoria was on 20 June 1857. In the following year, late-night openings were introduced, made possible by the use of gas lighting. In the words of museum director Cole gas lighting was introduced "to ascertain practically what hours are most convenient to the working classes". To raise interest for the museum among the target audience, the museum exhibited its collections on both applied art and science. The museum aimed to provide educational resources and thus boost the productive industry.
In these early years the practical use of the collection was very much emphasised as opposed to that of "High Art" at the National Gallery and scholarship at the British Museum. George Wallis, the first Keeper of Fine Art Collection, passionately promoted the idea of wide art education through the museum collections. This led to the transfer to the museum of the School of Design that had been founded in 1837 at Somerset House; after the transfer, it was referred to as the Art School or Art Training School, later to become the Royal College of Art which finally achieved full independence in 1949. From the 1860s to the 1880s the scientific collections had been moved from the main museum site to various improvised galleries to the west of Exhibition Road. In 1893 the "Science Museum" had effectively come into existence when a separate director was appointed.
Queen Victoria returned to lay the foundation stone of the Aston Webb building on 17 May 1899. It was during this ceremony that the change of name from 'South Kensington Museum' to 'Victoria and Albert Museum' was made public. Queen Victoria's address during the ceremony, as recorded in The London Gazette, ended: "I trust that it will remain for ages a Monument of discerning Liberality and a Source of Refinement and Progress."
The exhibition which the museum organised to celebrate the centennial of the 1899 renaming, A Grand Design, first toured in North America from 1997, returning to London in 1999. To accompany and support the exhibition, the museum published a book, Grand Design, which it has made available for reading online on its website.
1900–1950
The opening ceremony for the Aston Webb building by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra took place on 26 June 1909. In 1914 the construction commenced of the Science Museum, signaling the final split of the science and art collections.In 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War, most of the collection was sent to a quarry in Wiltshire, to Montacute House in Somerset, or to a tunnel near Aldwych tube station, with larger objects remaining in situ, sand-bagged and bricked in. Between 1941 and 1944 some galleries were used as a school for children evacuated from Gibraltar. The South Court became a canteen, first for the Royal Air Force and later for Bomb Damage Repair Squads.
Before the return of the collections after the war, the Britain Can Make It exhibition was held between September and November 1946, attracting nearly a million-and-a-half visitors. This was organised by the Council of Industrial Design, established by the British government in 1944 "to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry". The success of this exhibition led to the planning of the Festival of Britain to be held in 1951. By 1948 most of the collections had been returned to the museum.
Since 1950
In July 1973 as part of its outreach programme to young people, the V&A became the first museum in Britain to present a rock concert. The V&A presented a combined concert/lecture by the British progressive folk-rock band Gryphon, who explored the lineage of medieval music and instrumentation and related how those contributed to contemporary music 500 years later. This innovative approach to bringing young people to museums was a hallmark of the directorship of Sir Roy Strong and was subsequently emulated by some other British museums.In the 1980s Strong renamed the museum as "The Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museum of Art and Design". Strong's successor Elizabeth Esteve-Coll oversaw a turbulent period for the institution in which the museum's curatorial departments were re-structured, leading to public criticism from some staff. Esteve-Coll's attempts to make the V&A more accessible included a criticised marketing campaign emphasising the café over the collection.
In 2001 the museum embarked on a major £150m renovation programme, called the "FuturePlan". The plan involves redesigning all the galleries and public facilities in the museum that have yet to be remodelled. This is to ensure that the exhibits are better displayed, more information is available, access for visitors is improved, and the museum can meet modern expectations for museum facilities. A planned Spiral building was abandoned; in its place a new Exhibition Road Quarter designed by Amanda Levete's AL_A was created. It features a new entrance on Exhibition Road, a porcelain-tiled courtyard and a new 1,100-square-metre underground gallery space accessed through the Blavatnik Hall. The Exhibition Road Quarter project provided 6,400 square metres of extra space, which is the largest expansion at the museum in over 100 years. It opened on 29 June 2017.
In March 2018, it was announced that the Duchess of Cambridge would become the first royal patron of the museum. On 15 September 2018, the first V&A museum outside London, V&A Dundee, opened. The museum, built at a cost of £80.11m, is located on Dundee's waterfront, and is focused on Scottish design, furniture, textiles, fashion, architecture, engineering and digital design. Although it uses the V&A name, its operation and funding is independent of the V&A.
The museum also runs the Young V&A at Bethnal Green, which reopened on 1 July 2023; it used to run Apsley House, and also the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The Theatre Museum is now closed; the V&A Theatre Collections are now displayed within the South Kensington building.
Architecture
Victorian parts of the building have a complex history, with piecemeal additions by different architects. Founded in May 1852, it was not until 1857 that the museum moved to its present site. This area of London, previously known as Brompton, had been renamed 'South Kensington'. The land was occupied by Brompton Park House, which was extended, most notably by the "Brompton Boilers", which were starkly utilitarian iron galleries with a temporary look and were later dismantled and used to build the V&A Museum of Childhood. The first building to be erected that still forms part of the museum was the Sheepshanks Gallery in 1857 on the eastern side of the garden. Its architect was civil engineer Captain Francis Fowke, Royal Engineers, who was appointed by Cole. The next major expansions were designed by the same architect, the Turner and Vernon galleries built in 1858–1859 to house the eponymous collections and now used as the picture galleries and tapestry gallery respectively. The North and South Courts were then built, both of which opened by June 1862. They now form the galleries for temporary exhibitions and are directly behind the Sheepshanks Gallery. On the very northern edge of the site is situated the Secretariat Wing; also built in 1862, this houses the offices and boardroom, etc. and is not open to the public.An ambitious scheme of decoration was developed for these new areas: a series of mosaic figures depicting famous European artists of the Medieval and Renaissance period. These have now been removed to other areas of the museum. Also started were a series of frescoes by Lord Leighton: Industrial Arts as Applied to War 1878–1880 and Industrial Arts Applied to Peace, which was started but never finished. To the east of this were additional galleries, the decoration of which was the work of another designer, Owen Jones; these were the Oriental Courts, completed in 1863. None of this decoration survives.
Part of these galleries became the new galleries covering the 19th century, opened in December 2006. The last work by Fowke was the design for the range of buildings on the north and west sides of the garden. This includes the refreshment rooms, reinstated as the Museum Café in 2006, with the silver gallery above ; the top floor has a splendid lecture theatre, although this is seldom open to the general public. The ceramic staircase in the northwest corner of this range of buildings was designed by F. W. Moody and has architectural details of moulded and coloured pottery. All the work on the north range was designed and built in 1864–69. The style adopted for this part of the museum was Italian Renaissance; much use was made of terracotta, brick and mosaic. This north façade was intended as the main entrance to the museum, with its bronze doors, designed by James Gamble and, having six panels, depicting Humphry Davy ; Isaac Newton ; James Watt ; Bramante ; Michelangelo ; and Titian ; The panels thus represent the range of the museum's collections. Godfrey Sykes also designed the terracotta embellishments and the mosaic in the pediment of the North Façade commemorating the Great Exhibition, the profits from which helped to fund the museum. This is flanked by terracotta statue groups by Percival Ball. This building replaced Brompton Park House, which could then be demolished to make way for the south range.
The interiors of the three refreshment rooms were assigned to different designers. The Green Dining Room was the work of Philip Webb and William Morris, and displays Elizabethan influences. The lower part of the walls is paneled in wood with a band of paintings depicting fruit and the occasional figure, with moulded plaster foliage on the main part of the wall and a plaster frieze around the decorated ceiling and stained-glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones. The Centre Refreshment Room was designed in a Renaissance style by James Gamble. The walls and even the Ionic columns in this room are covered in decorative and moulded ceramic tile, the ceiling consists of elaborate designs on enamelled metal sheets and matching stained-glass windows, and the marble fireplace was designed and sculpted by Alfred Stevens and was removed from Dorchester House prior to that building's demolition in 1929. The Grill Room was designed by Sir Edward Poynter; the lower part of its walls consist of blue and white tiles with various figures and foliage enclosed by wood panelling, while above there are large tiled scenes with figures depicting the four seasons and the twelve months, painted by ladies from the Art School then based in the museum. The windows are also stained glass; there is an elaborate cast-iron grill still in place.
With the death of Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers, the next architect to work at the museum was Colonel Henry Young Darracott Scott, also of the Royal Engineers. He designed to the northwest of the garden the five-storey School for Naval Architects, now the Henry Cole Wing, in 1867–72. Scott's assistant J. W. Wild designed the impressive staircase that rises the full height of the building. Made from Cadeby stone, the steps are in length, while the balustrades and columns are Portland stone. It is now used to jointly house the prints and architectural drawings of the V&A and Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Sackler Centre for arts education, which opened in 2008.
Continuing the style of the earlier buildings, various designers were responsible for the decoration. The terracotta embellishments were again the work of Godfrey Sykes, although sgraffito was used to decorate the east side of the building designed by F. W. Moody. A final embellishment was the wrought iron gates made as late as 1885 designed by Starkie Gardner. These lead to a passage through the building. Scott also designed the two Cast Courts to the southeast of the garden ; these vast spaces have ceilings in height to accommodate the plaster casts of parts of famous buildings, including Trajan's Column. The final part of the museum designed by Scott was the Art Library and what is now the sculpture gallery on the south side of the garden, built in 1877–1883. The exterior mosaic panels in the parapet were designed by Reuben Townroe, who also designed the plaster work in the library. Sir John Taylor designed the bookshelves and cases. This was the first part of the museum to have electric lighting. This completed the northern half of the site, creating a quadrangle with the garden at its centre, but left the museum without a proper façade. In 1890 the government launched a competition to design new buildings for the museum, with architect Alfred Waterhouse as one of the judges; this would give the museum a new imposing front entrance.