By an Arts Student.
Societies have always used material culture to construct and communicate systems of belief, and museums have become one of the central spaces in which those systems are preserved, reframed, and challenged (Harding, 2020). When I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington as part of a class trip, going in with the readings and the worksheet present in my mind made it feel like an entirely different kind of visit. It stopped being a day out. It became a critical exercise.
A Brief History of a Very Big Idea
The V&A was founded in 1852, born directly out of the profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851, in which Britain placed its industrial and creative output on display for the world. Prince Albert pushed for those profits to be reinvested into a permanent district of museums in South Kensington. Its first director, Henry Cole, I believe described its purpose simply: the museum should function as a schoolroom for everyone, bringing great design to people who could never afford to travel and encounter it themselves. That ambition, as Harding (2020) sayed, was central to the Victorian belief that collecting objects from across the world was itself a form of progress. Standing inside the museum now, knowing that history, that belief is both impressive and worth interrogating.
What the Collections Actually Do
The permanent collection spans 145 galleries and over four and a half million objects; ceramics, textiles, sculpture, jewellery, furniture, photography, all drawn from practically every part of the world. Every room feels dense with intention, with objects lit and labelled and placed with obvious care. But care in whose direction, and towards whose understanding? That is the question the course has trained me to bring into these spaces.
I spent a while in the Cast Courts, two enormous Victorian halls filled with plaster reproductions of famous sculptures from across Europe. Trajan’s Column is split into two halves and stacked here because even these cavernous rooms cannot accommodate it whole. Michelangelo’s David stands at the far end, serene and enormous. These are copies. And yet the effect is undeniable. This is where Hooper-Greenhill’s argument became most present for me. In Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, she argues that museums do not simply display knowledge, they actively produce it. They decide what is significant and what we collectively remember. The Cast Courts were built on a democratic impulse, but who decided what counted as great? Whose monuments were worth casting? Walking through, the answer is predominantly European, predominantly ancient, predominantly male. The museum’s origins in Victorian Britain are not incidental to that selection. They are inseparable from it.
From there I moved into the gallery housing the Raphael Cartoons, seven full-scale tapestry designs painted around 1515 for Pope Leo X. They are extraordinary. But I found myself thinking about Berger’s argument in Ways of Seeing, that the meaning of an image changes depending on where it is seen. These designs were working documents, instructions for weavers. In this gallery, under careful lighting, they have become something they were never intended to be. You only notice that transformation if you already know to look for it.
Current Programme
The V&A’s current major exhibition is Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art; the UK’s first dedicated retrospective of the surrealist fashion house, open until November 2026. Tickets were sold out during my visit, but you could feel its presence in the building. Alongside this, a craft festival was running with family workshops across the ground floor, a reminder that the institution still takes Cole’s original ambition seriously, at least in aspiration. I think V&A East, a new site in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, opened in 2025, signalling that the institution is actively working to broaden its reach and its understanding of who its audience should be.
What I Took Away
The object I keep returning to is Tipu’s Tiger, the wooden mechanical organ in the shape of a tiger mauling a European soldier, made for Tipu Sultan of Mysore in the 1790s. It was seized by British forces after the fall of Seringapatam in 1799 and brought to London, where it has remained ever since. As Chambers and his colleagues argue in The Postcolonial Museum, objects like this embody conquest, resistance, memory, and display simultaneously. The museum label calls it a collection highlight. But a highlight for whom, exactly?
I also spent time in the Islamic Middle East galleries, and they were the rooms that stayed with me most. One object in particular made me stop: an enormous Syrian wooden ceiling, dismantled and reconstructed inside the gallery, dating from around 1600. It had been part of a reception room in Damascus before being brought here piece by piece. As Dean (2002) argues, the way objects are placed and encountered is itself a form of interpretation. The ceiling has not simply been moved. It has been given a new meaning by the space it now occupies.
Bennett argues in The Birth of the Museum that museums function as instruments of civic education, designed to produce certain kinds of visitors who look at certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways. Standing in the V&A, you feel both the power of that project and the unease of it. Coming from Asia myself, I noticed which galleries felt abundant and which felt sparse, whose objects were displayed as art and whose as curiosity. The visit did not give me answers. It sharpened my questions, and at this stage of my degree, I think that is exactly what it is supposed to do.
I will be going back, this time with more specific questions, and a better map.
References Used
Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books.
Chambers, I., De Angelis, A., Ianniciello, C., Miriam, O. and Quadraro, M. (eds.) (2014). The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. Farnham: Ashgate.
Dean, D. (2002). Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Harding, T. (2020). World culture, world history, and the roles of a museum. International Journal of Cultural Policy, pp.1–14.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
