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The Victoria & Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) is on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, west London. It specialises in applied and decorative arts.
The museum was established in 1852 as the South Kensington Museum, following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its first director was Sir Henry Cole, a utilitarian and joint organiser of the Great Exhibition who acquired some of the objects for the collection. Originally the museum contained both arts and sciences and was designed to inspire visitors with examples of achievement in both fields. It was believed at the time that this would help improve the tastes of consumers, manufacturers and designers, creating a virtuous circle that would benefit the culture and the economy.
The museum's bronze front doors (found in the Pirelli Garden) placed James Watt on an equal footing to Titian and Humphrey Davy with Michelangelo. However, in 1913, the scientific collection was split off and formed the core of The Science Museum. Since then the museum has maintained its role of one of the world's greatest decorative arts collections. It was renamed in 1899 in honour of Queen Victoria and her late consort Albert. In the 1980s Sir Roy Strong renamed the museum as "The Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museum of Art and Design".
The museum has a huge range of collections of European, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Islamic decorative arts. It has galleries for sculpture, glass, jewellery, church plate, armour, weapons, costume, textiles, musical instruments, wrought iron, stained glass, metalwork, ceramics, furniture, architecture, photography, British watercolour artists and much more.
One of the dramatic parts of the museum is the Cast Courts, comprising two large, skylighted rooms two storeys high housing hundreds of plaster casts of sculptures, friezes and tombs. One of these is dominated by a full-scale replica of Trajan's Column, cut in half in order to fit under the ceiling.
The building is Victorian and Edwardian. It covers 11 acres, has 145 galleries and a collection of 4 million items. The museum also runs the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green; and the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden and used to run Apsley House.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_and_Albert_museum)
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