Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
South Kensington
To everyone's surprise, the 1851 Great Exhibition was not only an enormous success,
but also actually yielded a profit, with which Prince Albert and his committee bought
87 acres of land in
South Kensington
. Institutions and museums, whose purpose was to
“extend the influence of Science and Art upon Productive Industry”, were to be
established here to form a kind of “
Museumland
”. Albert died of typhoid in 1861 at
the age of just 42, and never saw his dream fully realized, but “Albertopolis”, with its
remarkable cluster of
museums and colleges
, plus the vast Royal Albert Hall, now
stands as one of London's most enlightened examples of urban planning.
With the founding of “Museumland”, the surrounding area was transformed almost
overnight into one of the most fashionable in town. Fields, farms and private estates
were turned into street after street of ostentatious, whitewashed Italianate terraces,
grandiose red-brick mansions and mews houses. Today, the borough includes some of
the world's most expensive slices of real estate, and is the heartland of the privately
educated, wealthy offspring of the English middle and upper classes and also the
stamping ground of the international rich and famous.
18
Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)
Cromwell Rd • Daily 10am-5.45pm, Fri until 10pm • Free • Various free tours set off regularly from the main information desk in the Grand
Entrance •
T
020 7942 2000,
W
vam.ac.uk •
!
South Kensington
For variety and scale, the
Victoria and Albert Museum
is the greatest museum of applied
arts in the world. The range of exhibits on display means that whatever your taste, there's
bound to be something to grab your attention: the finest collection of Italian sculpture
outside Italy, the world's largest collection of Indian art outside India, plus extensive
Chinese, Islamic and Japanese galleries; a gallery of twentieth-century objets d'art; and
more Constable paintings than Tate Britain. The V&A's temporary shows on art,
photography and fashion - some of which you have to pay for - are among the best in
Britain. As Baedeker noted in 1905, “it can hardly be claimed that the arrangements of
the [museum] are specially perspicuous”. Beautifully but haphazardly displayed across a
seven-mile, four-storey maze of rooms, the V&A's treasures are impossible to survey in a
single visit, so get hold of a
free floor plan
to help you decide which areas to focus on.
The V&A began life in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures - it being Albert's
intention to bolster Britain's industrial dominance by inspiring factory workers,
students and craftspeople with examples of excellence in applied art and design. Later
it was renamed the South Kensington Museum, with Queen Victoria laying the
foundation stone in 1857. She was on hand again to give her blessing to the present,
deeply colonial building in 1899 (her last major public engagement), after which it was
known as the Victoria and Albert Museum; ten years later Aston Webb's imposing
main entrance, with its octagonal cupola, flying buttresses and pinnacles, was finished.
The side entrance on Exhibition Road, originally built in 1873 for the School of Naval
Architects, is equally ornate, with terracotta arcading and Minton tiles.
Raphael Cartoons
The most famous of the V&A's many exhibits are the
Raphael Cartoons
(room 48a) -
from the Italian
cartone
meaning a large piece of paper. They comprise seven vast,
full-colour paintings in distemper, which are, in fact, designs
for tapestries ordered in
1515 by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel. The pictures - based on episodes from the
New Testament - were bought by the future Charles I and subsequently reproduced in
countless tapestries and engravings thereby becoming more familiar and influential
than any of the artist's paintings. Alongside the paintings is an example of one of the
tapestries woven at Mortlake.
At the far end of the room stands the
Retable of St George
, a huge fifteenth-century
gilded altarpiece from Valencia, centred on a depiction of James I of Aragon defeating
the Moors at the Battle of Puig in 1237. More alarming, though, are the bloodthirsty
