A Schoolroom for Everyone - The Making of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overview

What you will study

A Schoolroom for Everyone - The Making of the Victoria and Albert Museum course offered by University of Oxford will discuss the following subject:

When Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the South Kensington Museum’s imposing new building in 1899 she declared that it would thereafter be known by Royal permission as the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was her last major public appearance, a final tribute to her beloved Albert, and a recognition of the success of an extraordinary institution, which began as a school intended to raise the standards of training available to design students and grew to become an entirely new kind of museum: inspiring imitators across Europe and permanently changing expectations of what a museum could do and be.

The South Kensington Museum arrived in Brompton - then on the outskirts of fashionable London - in 1857, brainchild of entrepreneur Henry Cole, supported by the efforts of a group of talented and sometimes wayward individuals and funded by the profits of the 1851 Great Exhibition. By purchase and bequest (helped along when necessary by flattery, persuasion and financial juggling), it had by the turn of the century amassed unrivalled collections of the art and design of almost every period and nation, worthy of a place dubbed by the press A Palace of Art, devoted to the free culture of the million. 

In 2016 the V&A won the prestigious Museum of the Year Award; since then there have been a series of ambitious new projects, in and beyond London, through which the museum continues to expand the possibilities of museum-visiting and collection access.

Victoria hoped that her new namesake would remain for ages a Monument of discerning Liberality and a Source of Refinement and Progress.