Victoria and Albert Museum

About Victoria and Albert Museum

Museum in London, England, United Kingdom

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, with a permanent collection of more than 2.8 million objects. Founded in 1852 in the wake of the Great Exhibition and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, its original home stands on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, in the museum quarter shared with the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Royal Albert Hall. It covers five hectares and more than 145 galleries, and entry to the permanent collection has been free since 2001, as at Britain's other national museums. The V&A is now a family of sites: Young V&A for children in Bethnal Green, V&A Dundee in Scotland, the Wedgwood Collection in Stoke, and V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum in the Olympic quarter, opened in 2025 and 2026. The collections span 5,000 years across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia: ceramics, glass, textiles, fashion, silver, jewellery, furniture, sculpture, prints, drawings and photographs, with the world's largest holding of post-classical sculpture and the greatest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture outside Italy, and East Asian collections especially strong in ceramics and metalwork. Muslim visitors will want the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Middle East, one of the largest Islamic art collections in the West, home to the celebrated 16th-century Ardabil Carpet alongside ceramics, metalwork, manuscripts, minbars and mihrabs from Andalusia to Iran. The museum is also known for its major temporary exhibitions on fashion, design and popular culture, the John Madejski Garden courtyard with its pool loved by children, the historic café decorated by William Morris, and the vast Cast Courts of plaster copies of European masterpieces.

Where:

London, United Kingdom