Victoria and Albert Museum: A National Museum of Art and Design
Site at a Glance
- Popularity
- Very High
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, Chinese, English, French, Indian, Japanese, Mamluk, Ming, Ottoman, Republic of Florence, Roman
- Site type
- Museum
On this page26 sections
History
The Victoria and Albert Museum is a museum of art, design, and historical craft in South Kensington, United Kingdom. Its institutional origins date to the Government School of Design, founded by the British government in 1832 to improve the use of art in manufacturing. The museum grew from the school’s teaching collections and from plans inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851, an international display of industrial products and design in London.
From design school to public museum
A museum associated with the Government School of Design collected objects for teaching, including items acquired at the French Industrial Exposition of 1844. In 1852, civil servant and museum organizer Henry Cole took charge of the school and developed it into the Museum of Manufactures. With a parliamentary grant, he bought objects from the Great Exhibition, among them Indian textiles and works by Augustus Pugin. The museum opened to the public at Marlborough House on 19 May 1852, and its collections moved to Somerset House that September. It took the name Museum of Ornamental Art in 1853.
The Great Exhibition helped prompt plans for a dedicated museum of design and industry. A proposed design for a new building by German architect Gottfried Semper was rejected in 1855 as too costly. The institution moved to South Kensington in 1857, where it became part of a wider programme of cultural and educational institutions associated with the exhibition. At Prince Albert’s suggestion, it was named the South Kensington Museum. Queen Victoria formally opened it on 20 June that year.
Education, collections, and a new name
In its early decades, the museum aimed to use art education to improve industrial production. It formed an integral part of Britain’s national art-education system during its first fifty years. The School of Design became part of the National Art Training School, which later developed into the Royal College of Art. The museum also introduced evening opening in 1858, after gas lighting was installed. Henry Cole intended this change to make the collections more accessible to working people.
The museum’s holdings grew through gifts, transfers, and purchases. In 1857, John Sheepshanks gave it 233 paintings and a similar number of drawings, chiefly by contemporary British artists. Collections from the India Museum, including material connected with the former East India Company, were divided between the V&A and the British Museum in 1879–80. Scientific collections were gradually separated from the museum; a separate director for them was appointed in 1893, and construction of the Science Museum began in 1914.
In 1899, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for a new building designed by Aston Webb and announced that the institution would be called the Victoria and Albert Museum, in honour of herself and Prince Albert. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra opened the building in 1909. The museum’s collection now spans about 5,000 years and includes applied and decorative arts, design, and craft from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
War, postwar change, and new audiences
During the Second World War, the museum moved many objects to safer locations, including Westwood Quarry, Montacute House, and tunnels near Aldwych and Brompton Road Underground stations. Larger objects remained in place, while the Raphael Cartoons were enclosed in a purpose-built shelter in the basement. From 1941 to 1944, some galleries served as a school for children evacuated from Gibraltar. The South Court became a canteen, first for the Royal Air Force and later for teams repairing bomb damage. Most of the evacuated objects had returned by 1948.
In 1946, the museum hosted Britain Can Make It, an exhibition organized by the Council of Industrial Design to encourage better design in British industry. Its success helped lead to plans for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The institution also changed the way it presented its holdings. Early twentieth-century displays were arranged largely by material, while postwar practice added galleries organized around periods, styles, and cultures. In 1973, a concert and lecture by the British progressive folk-rock band Gryphon explored links between medieval and contemporary music. The event formed part of director Sir Roy Strong’s effort to attract younger audiences, an approach later taken up by other British museums.
Expansion and institutional change
In 1947, the V&A took on the management of the Wellington Museum at Apsley House, Ham House, and Osterley Park as satellite museums. Those arrangements ended in 2004 for Apsley House and in 1991 for Ham House and Osterley Park. In 1974, the museum acquired the Henry Cole Wing from the Royal College of Science and adapted it for galleries. The Bethnal Green branch became the Museum of Childhood that year. The theatre collection moved from South Kensington to Covent Garden in 1987; after the Theatre Museum closed in 2007, galleries devoted to theatre and performance opened at South Kensington in 2009.
During Strong’s directorship in the 1980s, the museum’s name was expanded to The Victoria and Albert Museum, National Museum of Art and Design. His successor, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, reorganized curatorial and senior staff roles. The V&A remained under direct government-department control until 1983 and is now a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Like other British national museums, it offers free admission.
A long-term gallery redevelopment programme, FuturePlan, began in 2002. Later developments included new galleries for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European art, opened in 2015 with Victorian interiors restored, and the Exhibition Road Quarter, opened in 2017 as the largest expansion in more than a century. The museum’s institutional family also grew: the Wedgwood Collection joined in 2014, V&A Dundee opened in 2018, the Bethnal Green museum was relaunched as Young V&A in 2023, and V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum opened in 2025 and 2026 respectively.
The V&A’s South Kensington architecture gallery opened in 2004 in partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), whose drawings and archives joined the museum’s holdings. In 2022, RIBA announced that the partnership would end by mutual agreement in 2027, bringing the permanent gallery to a close and returning RIBA material to its own collections. In 2026, the museum agreed to censor images of 1930s maps of China at the request of the Chinese government’s General Administration of Press and Publication.
Remains
The South Kensington museum is a complex of buildings constructed in several phases around a central garden. Its early galleries and later wings reflect changing needs for exhibition, education, administration, and public use. The complex includes the red-brick and Portland-stone main building, historic interiors, purpose-built display spaces, and later additions.
Early buildings around the garden
Temporary galleries and the Sheepshanks Gallery
When the museum moved to South Kensington in 1857, Brompton Park House stood on the site. Temporary iron galleries, installed in 1856 and nicknamed the Brompton Boilers, included a refreshment room. After their removal in 1867, their ironwork was reused at the Bethnal Green branch. The first purpose-built museum structure still forming part of the South Kensington complex was the Sheepshanks Gallery, designed by civil engineer Captain Francis Fowke and built on the garden’s eastern side in 1857. Fowke added picture and tapestry galleries in 1858–59.
Courts, offices, and west-side building
The North and South Courts opened directly behind the Sheepshanks Gallery in 1862 and serve for temporary exhibitions. The South Court originally included thirty-five large mosaic figures of European artists in its upper level. Some were moved, while others were lost or put in storage. Lord Leighton designed two large semicircular frescoes for the court. The Oriental Courts to the east once had decoration by architect Owen Jones, which does not survive. The Secretariat Wing, built in 1862 on the southeast side, contains the boardroom and administrative offices and is not open to the public. A building completed on the west side of the garden in 1863 included staff residences.
North-side buildings and the Henry Cole Wing
North range and Ceramic Staircase
Fowke’s buildings along the north side included refreshment rooms, a ceramics gallery, access to the art and science schools, and a lecture theatre. The Ceramic Staircase, designed by F. W. Moody and completed in 1871, features moulded and coloured ceramic details, including work made with techniques developed by Minton, Hollins & Co. A mosaic in the triangular panel above the north façade, designed by Godfrey Sykes, commemorates the Great Exhibition. It is flanked by terracotta statue groups by Percival Ball. Bronze doors by James Gamble and Reuben Townroe show scientists and artists in six panels.
Henry Cole Wing
Henry Young Darracott Scott designed the five-storey building now known as the Henry Cole Wing. Built between 1867 and 1872, it was originally a school for naval architects. A full-height staircase was designed by Scott’s assistant, J. W. Wild. The wing has terracotta work by Godfrey Sykes and sgraffito, a decoration made by cutting through one surface layer to reveal another, designed by F. W. Moody. John Starkie Gardner designed its wrought-iron gates, made in 1885.
Cast Courts and the south range
Cast Courts
Scott also designed the Cast Courts, built southeast of the garden between 1870 and 1873. These two large, skylit rooms are three storeys high, with ceilings 83 feet (25 metres) above the floor. They display casts reproducing sculpture, architectural features, and tombs. Among them are a full-size replica of Trajan’s Column, divided into two parts to fit the space, and full-size casts of Michelangelo’s David and earlier statues of David by Donatello and Verrocchio. In 2004, partitions were removed from the connecting corridor on the upper level, opening the view between the courts.
Art Library and sculpture galleries
The Art Library and rooms now used as sculpture galleries were built on the garden’s south side between 1877 and 1884. Reuben Townroe designed exterior mosaic panels, while Sir John Taylor designed the library fittings. The museum restored the library in 1986. Work in 2006 also uncovered and restored Victorian mosaic floors in the sculpture galleries, many of which had been covered with linoleum after the war.
Aston Webb building and historic interiors
Main building
Aston Webb’s principal building was constructed from red brick and Portland stone between 1899 and 1909. Its façade runs 720 feet (220 metres) along Cromwell Gardens. The entrance combines shallow arches, slender columns, niches, and paired doors. Above it, a tower carries an openwork crown and a statue of Fame; statues of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria by Alfred Drury stand above the entrance doors. Inside are an entrance hall and rotunda, the East and West Halls, and a domed, octagonal Fashion Gallery. A series of rooms on the top floor has glazed ceilings that admit natural light; these rooms now contain ceramics.
Former refreshment rooms
The museum’s three named former refreshment rooms retain distinct decorative schemes. Philip Webb and William Morris designed the Green Dining Room, with wood-panelled lower walls, painted panels, a plaster frieze, and stained-glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones. James Gamble designed the Centre Refreshment Room in a Renaissance style, using moulded ceramic tiles, enamelled-metal ceiling panels, stained glass, and a marble fireplace by Alfred Stevens. The fireplace came from Dorchester House after its demolition in 1929. Edward Poynter’s Grill Room combines blue-and-white tiles with wood panelling and tiles representing the seasons and months. Neglected by the 1970s, the rooms were restored for public use between 1974 and 1978.
Garden and later additions
Central garden
The central garden was redesigned by Kim Wilkie and opened as the John Madejski Garden in 2005. It has an elliptical water feature lined with stone, steps in front of bronze doors, and a route across the lawns towards the sculpture gallery. Planted borders run along its north, east, and west sides, and glass containers hold seasonal plants. The garden has also hosted temporary sculpture displays. Restoration work in 1977 cleaned and repaired the façades around the garden.
Entrance link and Exhibition Road Quarter
Between 1978 and 1982, a new entrance building was constructed on the former boiler-house site to connect the Henry Cole Wing with the rest of the museum. Its corridor uses concrete and glass, and iron gates by Christopher Hay and Douglas Coyne were set into Aston Webb’s 1909 screen wall. The Exhibition Road Quarter, designed by Amanda Levete’s AL_A practice, opened in 2017 with 6,400 square metres of added space and a new entrance from Exhibition Road. The original screen wall, once built to conceal the boilers, was altered to open access to a 1,200-square-metre courtyard. Its surface has 11,000 handmade porcelain tiles arranged in fifteen linear patterns. A glass-walled pavilion with an angular roof contains a café, while skylights bring daylight to the stairs and underground exhibition space.
The underground Sainsbury Gallery provides 1,100 square metres of column-free exhibition space and is reached through Blavatnik Hall. A staircase with lacquered tulipwood balustrades descends to the gallery. The museum has also renewed other interiors over time. Work in 2002 restored Victorian decoration in the Silver Gallery, including ceramic details on two columns and painted ceiling decoration. The British galleries, completed in 2001, added display and study areas, interactive spaces, and period rooms. Ten Medieval and Renaissance galleries opened in 2009 on three floors in the eastern part of the Aston Webb building. Their redevelopment created brighter galleries, many lit by daylight, and made it possible to display more than 1,800 objects. An internal service yard became a three-storey gallery under a glass roof.
Collections and architectural displays
Architecture and casts
The museum’s architectural displays include the upper two floors of Sir Paul Pindar’s house, dating to about 1600, with carved woodwork and leaded windows. Its façade is a rare survivor of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Other architectural works include a dormer window from the Château de Montal dated 1523–35, features from Italian Renaissance buildings, and a column from the Alhambra. The Medieval and Renaissance galleries display, among other works, the façade of Pindar’s house, a rood loft, or raised church gallery or screen, from St John’s Cathedral in ’s-Hertogenbosch, and the chapel from the convent of Santa Chiara in Florence.
The Santa Chiara chapel, designed by Giuliano da Sangallo and dated 1493–1500, measures 11.1 metres high and 5.4 metres square. It includes a sculpted tabernacle by Antonio Rossellino and coloured terracotta decoration. The museum’s architectural holdings also include a brick portal from a London house of the English Restoration period and parts of buildings from other regions. The former architecture gallery used models, photographs, original drawings, and building fragments to present architectural history. The combined V&A and RIBA holdings included more than 600,000 drawings, 750,000 papers and related documents, and 700,000 photographs.
Paintings and sculpture
The paintings collection includes seven surviving full-scale designs by Raphael for tapestries made for the Sistine Chapel, lent to the museum by the British monarch, and a fresco by Pietro Perugino dated 1522. The Altarpiece of the Centenar de la Ploma, painted by Andrés Marzal de Sax around 1400, is a tempera-on-wood work measuring 670 by 486 centimetres. Thomas Gainsborough’s experimental showbox uses landscapes painted on glass and backlighting to make images change like slides.
Sculpture displays include Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces, jointly owned with the National Galleries of Scotland, and casts of Michelangelo’s David and earlier versions by Donatello and Verrocchio. A fresco by Perugino, the Raphael designs, and the Santa Chiara chapel are among the works presented in the museum’s galleries.
Decorative arts and material culture
The museum’s broad holdings include sculpture, ceramics, glass, textiles, fashion, jewellery, metalwork, furniture, prints, drawings, and photography from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Islamic art displays include the Ardabil Carpet, a tenth-century rock-crystal ewer, a fifteenth-century minbar, or raised pulpit in a mosque, from Cairo, and examples of mosque lamps, ceramics, metalwork, and architectural tilework. Other architectural pieces include an Istanbul fireplace dated 1731 and blue, white, and turquoise tiles from buildings in Samarkand.
Indian art galleries include religious sculpture and architectural elements such as jaali screens, perforated screens often made of stone or wood, and columns. Chinese displays include a bronze Buddha head dated to about 750, a jade horse head recovered from a burial, eighteenth-century silk ancestor portraits, and a lacquer table made in imperial workshops. Japanese displays include a thirteenth-century Amida sculpture and a large bronze incense burner made by Suzuki Chokichi in 1875, measuring more than 2.25 metres high and 1.25 metres in diameter.
Metalwork displays include the Hereford Screen, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1862 for Hereford Cathedral and removed from the cathedral in 1967. Made by Skidmore & Company, it combines timber and cast iron with wrought iron, burnished brass, and copper. It is about 10.5 metres high and 11 metres wide and weighs nearly eight tonnes. Other works include the gilt-bronze Gloucester Candlestick, made around 1110 and 58 centimetres high; the Becket Casket, made around 1180 to contain relics of Thomas Becket; a Reichenau crozier dated 1351; and the Burghley Nef, a French salt cellar made in 1527–28.
War damage and restoration
The South Kensington buildings sustained relatively minor bomb damage during the Second World War. Fragments from bombs left visible marks on stonework facing Exhibition Road, and nearby explosions shattered Victorian stained glass above the Ceramic Staircase. In the main entrance hall, a Welsh-slate memorial commemorates fourteen museum staff killed in the Second World War. A stone plaque by Eric Gill and Joseph Cribb commemorates sixteen staff killed in the First World War. Alongside the restoration of the refreshment rooms, the museum repaired the garden façades in 1977, restored the Cast Courts between 1978 and 1982, and restored the entrance hall between 1983 and 1986.
