Victoria & Albert Museum

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, known to everyone as the V&A, is the world's largest museum devoted to the applied arts, the decorative arts and design. Its collections number over 2.8 million objects: furniture, ceramics, glass, textiles, dress, jewellery, silver, sculpture, drawings and photographs, from all over the world and from five thousand years of history. It was founded with a specific purpose that makes it fundamental to the history of design: to improve the quality of industrial products by educating designers, manufacturers and the public.

From the Great Exhibition to the museum

The museum's origins go back to the Government School of Design, founded in the 1830s to apply the arts to manufacturing, and above all to London's Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world's fair. The exhibition's success, but also the poor quality of many British industrial products, convinced the civil servant Henry Cole and Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, to create a museum of models to study. In 1852 the Museum of Manufactures was born, in the royal residence of Marlborough House, with objects bought at the exhibition itself. In 1857 the museum moved to the South Kensington district and was renamed the South Kensington Museum.

The South Kensington Museum

The museum was innovative in its services too: it was the first museum in the world to have a refreshment room for visitors. Its three refreshment rooms are masterpieces of the decorative arts, and one of them, the Green Dining Room (1866–1868), is the work of Philip Webb and William Morris, father of the Arts and Crafts movement: it is now called the Morris Room. On 17 May 1899 Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the large new building designed by Aston Webb, and the museum took its present name, in memory of the Queen and Prince Albert. The building opened in 1909. The design school born alongside the museum later became the Royal College of Art.

The design collections

For design lovers the V&A is a journey through the whole history of objects: from Renaissance furniture to that of the Aesthetic Movement, such as Edward William Godwin's famous Anglo-Japanese sideboard, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco, through to contemporary design. Among its most famous pieces are one of the Surrealist Mae West Lips Sofas and the prototype of Martine Bedin's Super lamp, designed for Memphis. The museum also collects objects of today, linked to current events, to document how design changes society.

The new sites

Today the V&A is not only in South Kensington. In 2018 it opened V&A Dundee in Scotland, the first Scottish design museum, in a building by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma which houses, among other things, the Oak Room tearoom by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, leading figure of the Glasgow School. In East London the V&A East Storehouse opened in 2025, a store open to the public where thousands of objects can be seen up close, followed in 2026 by the new V&A East Museum. Together with New York's MoMA, the V&A is the museum that has done most to make design be seen as an art form.