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£120m renovation will bring V&A treasures out of the backroom
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent12 Nov 2008
THE Victoria and Albert Museum is on course to complete its nine-year £120million transformation of its galleries, director Mark Jones will announce today.
Ten new medieval and Renaissance galleries, costing £30million, will open this time next year in the biggest museum development in London since the Millennium.
They will span the entire east wing and present V&A treasures in continuous displays, telling the story of European art and design from the fall of the Roman empire to the end of the Renaissance.
The museum is redisplaying more than 1,800 objects including the Becket Casket - a Limoges enamel casket depicting the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket - Gothic altarpieces and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Next year galleries will also open for the museum's ceramics collection - the most comprehensive in the world.
They will be the new home of works by Clarice Cliff, Bernard Leach, Wedgewood and Ming porcelain and will open on 18 September.
The theatre and performance galleries will open on 18 March with displays including a first folio of Shakespeare's plays, a guitar Pete Townshend smashed on stage with The Who, and the original 1957 poster for Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court.
This is intended to help make up for the closure of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden due to lack of funds. The Gilbert collection of silver, previously seen at Somerset House and now in South Kensington, will also go on display.
Mr Jones said next year would be the "remarkable" conclusion of the Future Plan.
"Under Future Plan, we have completed a tremendous amount of work and transformed the museum. Anyone who last visited the V&A before 2001 would find it almost unrecognisable today," he said.
"The new medieval and Renaissance galleries will be among the most striking in the V&A and will mean 70 per cent of the museum has been redisplayed. The V&A can now claim to be a world-class 21st-century museum with beautiful contemporary displays in a revitalised historic building."
He said they would "struggle on" to try to renovate the final 30 per cent of the floor area in future years - although the second phase includes new buildings in Exhibition Road, and would be costly.
The renovations have doubled annual visitor numbers to more than two million since Mr Jones joined seven and a half years ago.
Projects completed include new galleries for silver, photography, paintings and sculpture.
