The Victoria and Albert Museum

The name, and the two dates people run together

The museum was not founded in 1899 and its building did not open in 1899, though both dates get attached to that year. What happened on 17 May 1899 was that Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the new building and directed that the institution be styled the Victoria and Albert Museum — she had wanted it called the Albert Museum, after her husband alone. She died in 1901. The building she laid the stone for was opened by King Edward VII on 26 June 1909.

Nor was the museum founded in 1857, the other date in circulation. By its own account it began in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures, at Marlborough House on Pall Mall; it was renamed the Museum of Ornamental Art in 1853; and it moved to South Kensington in 1857 as the South Kensington Museum, opening to the public on 22 June 1857. Its own archivists trace the intellectual origin further back still, to a Government School of Design set up at Somerset House in 1837.

Where it came from, and what 1851 actually paid for

The story usually told is that the museum was founded with the profits of the Great Exhibition. That is not quite it. The surplus bought the land.

The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 was set up under a royal charter in 1850 with Prince Albert as its president. The Exhibition ran from 1 May to 15 October 1851, 141 days, and drew 6,039,195 visits — 109,915 of them on its busiest day, 7 October. It left a surplus of about £186,000, and a supplemental charter extended the Commission in perpetuity so it could spend it, under a mission to increase the means of industrial education and extend the influence of science and art upon productive industry. With that money the Commissioners bought an 87-acre estate in South Kensington in 1852 and 1853.

The remarkable part is that the Commission still exists. It awards around thirty-five postgraduate fellowships and scholarships a year in science, engineering, the built environment and design — and it still owns and manages the South Kensington estate, granting long leases at below-market rates to the institutions on it, this museum among them. It is, in other words, the museum's landlord rather than its founder.

The museum itself grew out of the government's Department of Practical Art and was paid for by the state. Its first director was Sir Henry Cole, who had pressed for the 1851 Exhibition to be enlarged, is widely credited with the management that made it a success, and was instrumental in directing the surplus towards the land purchase. The museum's own list of directors gives his dates as 1852 to 1873 and conspicuously gives him no formal directorial title, describing him instead as having organised and conducted the museums; other institutional accounts date his directorship from 1857.

1909, and the museum that split off

The thing that makes the South Kensington story hard to tell cleanly is that for half a century one institution held both the art and the science collections. The science side was named the Science Museum as early as 1885 and had its own director from 1893, but a sign at the science buildings still read "Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Collections".

The separation was settled in 1909, when the President of the Board of Education ruled that the name Victoria and Albert Museum applied only to the art museum. The Science Museum was formally established on 26 June 1909 — the same day Edward VII opened the new building next door. So the two museums are not neighbours by coincidence and neither is the parent of the other: they are the two halves of something that was one thing until that day.

The buildings

The front on Cromwell Road is Sir Aston Webb's, from a competition of 1891 in which the Office of Works invited eight architects. The main building is Grade I listed, first listed on 15 April 1969.

Behind it is older work by Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers, who died in 1865 at forty-two: the quadrangle façades of 1860, designed with Cole, and the Cole Wing of 1868 to 1873, which is separately listed Grade II* and was finished after his death. Fowke is also the man who won the competition for the Natural History Museum — a building Alfred Waterhouse then redesigned and built.

The first buildings on the site were neither. In 1856 and 1857 the museum put up prefabricated iron sheds clad in corrugated iron, which The Builder nicknamed the Brompton Boilers. They were largely dismantled in 1867 and re-erected at Bethnal Green, where James Wild handled the reassembly and where they opened as the Bethnal Green Museum in 1872. They are still standing and still in use: that building is now Young V&A.

The Refreshment Rooms

Three rooms opened in 1868 and were decorated over several years afterwards, and they are worth the detour for the names attached to them. The Gamble Room, originally the Centre Refreshment Room, was begun by Godfrey Sykes and taken over by James Gamble after Sykes died in 1866. The Poynter Room, originally the Grill Room, is Edward John Poynter's — and worth noting that the statutory list entry misprints his initials, which is a useful reminder that official sources are not automatically right. The Morris Room, originally the Green Dining Room, is William Morris's, with Philip Webb and Edward Burne-Jones. Together they are the museum's café today.

The museum describes itself as the first in the world to provide a public restaurant, and notes that most other museums did not invest in catering until the twentieth century. That is its own claim, made on its own pages, and no independent corroboration of it could be found — so it is worth repeating as the museum's account rather than as established fact.

The Cast Courts, and the Raphael Cartoons

The Cast Courts opened in July 1873 as the Architectural Courts, built to hold plaster casts and reproductions so that students could study works they had no means of travelling to. The tallest object in the museum is here: a cast of Trajan's Column, 35.6 metres, in two pieces because it will not fit in one. There is also a cast of Michelangelo's David, given to Queen Victoria by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and one of the Pórtico de la Gloria from Santiago de Compostela, commissioned in 1866. The courts were refurbished in phases and reopened on 1 December 2018; they now carry donors' names rather than compass points.

The Raphael Cartoons are the museum's greatest holding and the museum does not own them. All seven belong to the King and have been on loan since 1865. They are the full-scale designs Pope Leo X commissioned from Raphael in 1515 for tapestries in the Sistine Chapel, showing the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, and all seven are on display. Their gallery reopened in May 2021 with new lighting and acoustic panelling, and with very high-resolution colour, infrared and three-dimensional imaging available alongside the originals.

The Exhibition Road Quarter, and the name that came off it

The entrance on Exhibition Road opened on 30 June 2017, designed by AL_A — Amanda Levete's practice — chosen from a field the museum put at more than a hundred and ten teams. It added the Blavatnik Hall, a courtyard paved with more than eleven thousand handmade porcelain tiles, and the Sainsbury Gallery, eleven hundred square metres of column-free exhibition space eighteen metres below ground. It also opened up Aston Webb's screen into eleven colonnade entrances. The museum said more than £48 million was raised for the work and has published no total cost.

The courtyard carried the Sackler name from 2017. The museum removed it in 2022 — the decision taken in May, the signage gone by that October, by mutual agreement with the family — saying at the time that it had no plans to rename the spaces. It now calls it the Exhibition Road Courtyard, a name that simply appeared on its pages without any announcement, so no date can honestly be given for it.

The other five sites

There are six in all, and two of them are new enough that most accounts have not caught up.

V&A East Storehouse opened on 31 May 2025 at Stratford, by Diller Scofidio and Renfro: a working store that can be visited, holding over two hundred and fifty thousand objects, three hundred and fifty thousand books and a thousand archive collections, with a service that lets visitors order an object to be brought out. The David Bowie Centre opened inside it in September 2025, holding more than ninety thousand items from his archive. Then V&A East Museum, a separate building by O'Donnell and Tuomey, opened on 18 April 2026 with two free permanent galleries and a charged exhibition space. Anyone describing V&A East as a single new museum is a building behind.

Young V&A at Bethnal Green — the former Museum of Childhood, in the old Brompton Boilers — reopened under its present name on 1 July 2023 after a thirteen-million-pound transformation. It won Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2024 and the Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2026.

V&A Dundee opened on 15 September 2018, designed by Kengo Kuma, an eighty-million-pound project. It is not a branch, which is the usual misunderstanding: it is run by a Scottish charity, Design Dundee, of which this museum is one of five founding partners alongside the city council, two universities and Scottish Enterprise. The sixth site is the V&A Wedgwood Collection in Staffordshire.

What is closed, and the money behind it

The closures are substantial and long. The South Asia Gallery closed on 2 March 2026 and reopens in spring 2028, with four million pounds committed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The Fashion Gallery is closed for major works and reopens in autumn 2028. The Korea Gallery is also closed, and its reopening date is a case worth recording: the museum's visitor pages say December 2026, while its own annual report gives January 2027 in one section and November in another.

Behind that is financial pressure the museum has been open about. Grant-in-aid was £59.9 million in 2025–26, up from £56.2 million, but the museum has opened a voluntary exit scheme to all staff, asked teams to propose cuts of ten to fifteen per cent, and proposed dismantling much of its adult education arm, with consultation closing on 26 October 2026 and no outcome yet reported. There were strikes by two unions on three occasions during the autumn of 2026, in September and late October.

Getting in

General admission is free and needs no booking; exhibitions and some events are ticketed. On 28 September 2026 the Culture Secretary ruled out charging overseas visitors for entry to the fifteen national museums sponsored by the culture department, this one among them, and committed to universal free entry to their permanent collections. England's nationals introduced free admission on 1 December 2001, so the arrangement turns twenty-five in December 2026.

It opens daily from ten in the morning, until a quarter to six on most days and until ten at night on Fridays, with some galleries closing earlier on Friday evenings, and shuts from 24 to 26 December.

On access, the detail that matters is at the station rather than the museum. The Cromwell Road and Exhibition Road entrances are both step-free, but the tunnel entrance is not wheelchair accessible, and — the point most accounts miss — South Kensington is not a step-free station. The nearest one is Knightsbridge, about fourteen minutes' walk away. The tunnel in question is the South Kensington Subway of 1885, a listed structure opened by the Prince of Wales on 4 May that year and engineered by Sir John Wolfe Barry, which runs under Exhibition Road with exits serving this museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. Piccadilly line upgrade works through 2026 and 2027 may disrupt journeys.

How big it is, and the figures to distrust

Two kinds of number attach to this museum and neither is safe to quote without saying which it is.

On the collection, the museum's own figures do not agree with each other. Its annual report for 2025–26 gives 1,711,283 museum objects, with 1,142,363 library items and 1,219 archive collections counted separately. Its About pages say over 2.8 million objects, which is roughly the first two of those added together. Its collections search says more than 1.25 million, which is the number catalogued online rather than the size of the holding. The museum gives no gallery count at all, so the figure of a hundred and forty-five that circulates is unsupported; what it does say is that the site covers about twelve acres and holds seven miles of galleries.

On visitors, the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions recorded 3,332,300 visits in calendar 2025 and ranked the South Kensington museum seventh in the United Kingdom; the museum's own accounts give 3,349,300 for the financial year to March 2026 and 4,550,600 across all six sites. The two headline figures are close enough to be mistaken for a contradiction; they cover different twelve-month periods.

One superlative to leave alone. The description of this as the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design is repeated everywhere, including by sources that ought to know better. The museum does not make that claim — its own wording is the world's leading museum of art, design and performance — and nothing substantiates the version with "largest" in it.