The V&A began as a government fix for Britain's badly designed exports
In 1832 officials worried that poor art teaching was hurting British manufacturing, so they opened a School of Design. That modest teaching collection grew into the world's largest museum of applied and decorative art, holding over 2.8 million objects and, by one account, the first museum café anywhere.
The school opened at Somerset House with casts of classical sculpture for students to copy. Change came in January 1852, when Henry Cole took charge and set out to raise the artistic taste of the whole population rather than just train artisans. Prince Albert, his ally from the Great Exhibition, lent Marlborough House on The Mall, and Cole spent a £5000 parliamentary grant buying exhibition pieces, including Indian textiles and work by Augustus Pugin. In 1853 the renamed Museum of Ornamental Art drew 125,000 visitors.
Albert then planned a cluster of arts and science institutions at Brompton, nicknamed Albertopolis by the press, whose later offspring include Imperial College and both the Science and Natural History museums. Cole thought Brompton sounded shabby and had the district rebranded South Kensington. The museum moved there in 1857, and Queen Victoria opened it on 20 June. Its first extension, iron sheds mocked as the Brompton Boilers, looked hideous to critics but included a refreshment room. Gas lighting from 1858 allowed evening hours so working people could visit.
Curator John Charles Robinson, appointed in 1853, toured France, Italy and Spain every year, buying pieces released by revolutions and the closure of religious houses. He effectively cornered the market in medieval sculpture and built the largest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture outside Italy. The Cast Courts, designed by Henry Young Darracott Scott and built from 1870 to 1873, rise 83 feet so that giant plaster copies could stand whole, among them Trajan's Column in two sections and a full-size Michelangelo's David.
The collection now spans 5,000 years and six sites, and the Bethnal Green branch, built partly from the recycled Boilers ironwork, became the Young V&A in 2023. Government departments ran the museum directly until 1983; it is now a public body sponsored by the culture department, and entry remains free.
Source: Victoria and Albert Museum
