NFT Map: 37
Address: Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL
Phone: 020 7942 2000
Website: www.vam.ac.uk
Hours: 10am – 5.45pm daily. Select areas open until 10pm every Friday. National Art Library open 10am – 5.30pm daily and 6.30 on Fridays. Check website for areas/activities that require booking. Closed 24th, 25th and 26th of December.
Admission: Free to the permanent collection. There is a charge for temporary exhibitions. Tickets have an allotted time slot and although they can be purchased on the day, it is recommended you book ahead of time by phone or online, especially with the more popular exhibitions.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, or the V&A, calls itself the world’s greatest museum of art and design and nowhere has there ever been such an eclectic collection of objects inducing so many ‘ooooohs’, ‘aaaaahs’ and ‘holy shits!’. With a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects, pretty much all on display in the 145 galleries, you can go everyday for a lifetime and be blown over by something you hadn’t noticed before. For the tourist and non-tourist alike, the V&A is a wonderful maze of cultural ramblings. You’ll get lost, overwhelmed and flustered, but we promise you won’t get bored.
The V&A is a cabinet of curiosities of gargantuan proportions, boasting 5000 years of art and design, in every medium imaginable (from wax dioramas to a little black dress made of bras), spread over seven levels and organised by five themes—Asia, Europe, Materials & Techniques, Modern and Exhibitions. The trouble is where to start. You’ll no doubt spend the first 10 minutes mesmerised by the glass Chihuly chandelier over the information booth, but what you do afterwards depends on how much time you have. Got hours? Avoid structure and just wander. Got an hour? Take a look at the map, see what strikes your fancy and head straight there. Just don’t forget to hit up the gift shop afterwards—it’s killer.
There’s no real method to the V&A’s madness. Despite their best efforts to categorise everything, Vivienne Westwood gowns are just a stumble away from 1000 year-old Buddhas. But this is a great thing. The best advice is really to ditch the guidebook and go with your instincts. To make sure you take in the best stuff, start in the basement (having arrived through the Tunnel Entrance from the tube station), where you’ll find the 17th century Cabinet of Curiosities—predecessors to the modern museum—which will get you in the right mind set. Weaving past bits and pieces of Versailles, you emerge onto the ground floor (Level 1) which covers fashion, Asia and both Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Highlights of which include the cast courts, which boast a life-size replica of Trajan’s Column in plaster, then onto ancient samurai swords and spectacular kimonos in Asia, the Ardabil Carpet—the largest and most amazing Islamic carpets in existence dating from 1539 (lit up on the hour and half-hour), an extensive costume room covering everything from 18th century crinolines to Juicy Couture worthy of Paris Hilton, and lastly, Raphael’s cartoons—massive sketches for a 1515 commission of tapestries that now hang in the Vatican. Before heading on, stop for a tea in the Morris, Gamble & Poynter Rooms café for teacakes in 1860s arts and crafts surroundings. Level 2 consists of the tucked away British Galleries, including the Great Bed of Ware as well as the endearing Lord and Lady Clapham dolls bedecked in miniature turn-of-the-18th century outfits. Up again on Level 3, you’ll find the Materials & Techniques rooms, with its vast collections of silver, ironwork and musical instruments, as well as some dynamite paintings. Don’t miss Rossetti’s The Daydream and then Ron Arad’s Chair in the modern rooms. This floor also houses the National Art Library—an art history student’s research dream (you have to get a reading pass to study here though). Level 4 has a wonderfully tactile display of glasswork, as well as architecture and more British Galleries from 1760-1900. If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a knighthood.