V&AMAZING!

The Scottish outpost of the world-renowned Victoria and Albert Museum f inally opens this week. Here’s your guide to some of its sumptuous treasures...

THE V&A Dundee opens its doors this week – shining a light on the best of Scottish design and creating a bold new feature in the country’s cultural landscape.

The £80 million ‘flagship for Scottish heritage’ – the nation’s first museum dedicated to design – has been ten years in the planning and opens on Saturday with its inaugural exhibition, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style.

It will be the V&A’s only museum outside London, and already all 6,000 tickets for the opening weekend have been snapped up.

Designed by Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect who created the national stadium for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the new V&A is the centrepiece of a £1 billion transformation of Dundee City waterfront, stretching for five miles alongside the Tay.

An estimated 4,800 jobs will be created as a result of the new riverside development, with 361 of these already accounted for at the V&A.

The project was estimated to cost £45 million but the work was pushed over budget after the building’s blueprints ended up being a third larger than the original design.

Set up as a global home for Scottish design, V&A Dundee is just one part of the city’s efforts to rejuvenate using art and culture. In 2014 the UN named Dundee as the Unesco City of Design and last year it made the shortlist for the UK City of Culture.

The changing city has already attracted new investors and visitors.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander said: ‘We’ve predicted an economic boost to the region of £11.6 million a year.’

In the first 12 months, 500,000 visitors are expected to visit the new museum.

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‘The flagship for Scottish heritage’