Victoria and Albert Museum

The museum's origins lie in the Government School of Design, established in 1832 at Somerset House for "the direct application of the Arts to Manufactures". It was created because the government feared that poor art education was restricting the growth and export potential of British industry. Henry Cole, appointed head in January 1852, meant it to "elevate the Art Education of the whole people", and Prince Albert, who had worked with him on the Great Exhibition, offered Marlborough House for the new Museum of Manufactures. With a £5,000 parliamentary grant Cole bought exhibits from the Great Exhibition of 1851, and in 1853 the museum was renamed the Museum of Ornamental Art.

In 1857 it moved to Brompton, where Prince Albert was planning a group of institutions for industry and the arts, and was renamed the South Kensington Museum at his suggestion; Cole had persuaded the authorities to rename the run-down district South Kensington to attract visitors. The iron galleries put up there in 1856, the Brompton Boilers, were dismantled in 1867 and their ironwork re-erected in East London as the Bethnal Green branch, now the Young V&A.

Queen Victoria opened the museum on 20 June 1857. The museum's own School of Design became part of the National Art Training School, later the Royal College of Art. Gas lighting allowed late-night opening from 1858, which Cole believed would show what hours suited the working classes.

John Charles Robinson, curator from 1853, travelled to France, Italy and Spain each year for a decade, buying treasures thrown onto the market by upheaval, revolution and the disestablishment of religious institutions; the museum assembled the greatest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture outside Italy. Henry Young Darracott Scott's Cast Courts of 1870-73 brought together plaster casts from around the building; his Art Library and sculpture galleries of 1877-84 were the first part of the museum to have electric lighting.

A competition launched in 1890 for buildings to front the museum on Cromwell Road was won in 1891 by Aston Webb. Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone on 17 May 1899, and it was at that ceremony that the change of name from South Kensington Museum to Victoria and Albert Museum was made public. Webb's front, of red brick and Portland stone, was built between 1899 and 1909; King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra opened it on 26 June 1909. Construction of the Science Museum began in 1914, marking the final split between the science and art collections.

On the outbreak of war in 1939 many items went to Westwood quarry at Bradford-on-Avon, to Montacute House in Somerset and to tunnels near Aldwych and Brompton Road tube stations, while larger objects stayed in place, sandbagged and bricked in. The Raphael Cartoons were bricked into a basement shelter. The museum remained open throughout the war. Galleries housed a school for children evacuated from Gibraltar between 1941 and 1944, and the South Court became a canteen, first for the Royal Air Force and later for Bomb Damage Repair Squads. Two bombs in Exhibition Road in November 1940 destroyed the windows and grilles on that side of the building.

The Britain Can Make It exhibition, held there from September to November 1946 by the Council of Industrial Design, drew nearly a million and a half visitors; its success led to the planning of the Festival of Britain of 1951. A memorial in Welsh slate to the fourteen members of staff killed in the war was unveiled in the entrance hall in 1950, close to the plaque carved by Eric Gill and Joseph Cribb to the sixteen staff killed in the First World War.

The rebuilding of the fifteen British galleries in 2001 was the museum's largest project in fifty years, and its success prompted FuturePlan, a programme to redesign every gallery.

The Exhibition Road Quarter opened in 2017 and added 6,400 square metres. Its courtyard bore the Sackler name, the family whose Purdue Pharma made the opioid painkiller OxyContin having part-sponsored it; the artist Nan Goldin led a "die-in" there in November 2019 in protest at the museum's acceptance of Sackler donations, and in 2022 the museum cut all financial ties and removed the name. V&A Dundee, the first V&A outside London, opened in September 2018 and V&A East Storehouse in June 2025. Controlled directly by a government department until 1983, the museum is now a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; entrance is free.