Battle of gift shops as V&A boss sneers at British Museum ‘tat’

AS A museum devoted to art and design, the V&A is a temple of good taste. And the British Museum could pick up a few tips, according to the V&A’S chairman.

Nicholas Coleridge has suggested, somewhat mischievously, that his institution is superior to its rival because it does not sell tourist tat.

He made the jibe during a discussion about the V&A’S recent successes, which include a record year of sales for its shop.

“The British Museum shop increasingly sells Teddy bears wearing policemen’s helmets. The V&A shop sells the most beautiful jewellery and incredibly lovely William Morris drying up cloths,” he told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Coleridge also boasted of “the deeply satisfying fact” that the V&A shop overtook the British Museum shop in sales for the first time last year. A V&A spokesman later corrected the chairman, saying he had made the comment in error and the British Museum made a higher profit.

The V&A main shop in South Kensington did have its most successful year to date, grossing £7.3million last year, a

‘The British Museum shop increasingly sells Teddy bears [that are] wearing policemen’s helmets’

30 per cent increase on the previous 12 months – thanks in part to merchandise related to its Frida Kahlo exhibition. The British Museum said total income across its four on-site shops plus online sales was £14.5 million.

Famously, the V&A ran an advertising campaign in the Eighties in which it was described as “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”. That slogan could now be adapted to substitute the shop for the café.

Many visitors buy souvenirs, glance at exhibits close to the entrance hall and then leave, Coleridge said.

“If you come through the Cromwell Road entrance, many people don’t get much further than the first 150 yards in any direction,” he said.

He is promoting his memoir, The Glossy Years, in which he discusses his life as chairman of the Condé Nast magazine empire. His job there was “40 per cent being interested in editorial control, 40 per cent on the business side of things, and 20 per cent diva control”.

His staff separated into distinct tribes. Vogue staff are “extraordinarily thin”, GQ staff work in a fug of testosterone, Tatler is “full of very social, rather treacherous girls who would say pretty much anything about anyone they knew in order to write something funny” and everyone who works on House & Garden “grew up in an old rectory somewhere near Tetbury”.