The Daily Telegraph - Features
This is the finest family museum I have ever visited
Young V&A
London E2 ★★★★★
When the Museum of Childhood in London’s East End closed in 2020, local parents such as me were bereft. Yes, the place was dusty and gloomy, and the rows of vitrines, with their playthings of old, arranged in strict ranks, gave it the faintly unsettling air of a toy prison. But entry was free, the collection expansive, and you could tire out a six-year-old with one full circuit.
Three years and £13million later, this once neglected offshoot of the Victoria and Albert Museum is reopening with a new name, Young V&A, and a sparky new attitude. Now a museum for children, it’s the best-designed and -curated my family and I have ever visited.
In place of the glass cell-blocks is a Wonka factory of learning and discovery, split into three themed galleries: Play, Imagine and Design. (A fourth will provide space for temporary exhibitions.) The stroke of curatorial genius is that the toys and games one might expect to find here are now displayed alongside what would usually – and wrongly – be thought of as artefacts for grown-ups, all drawn from the V&A’s wider collections.
In the Imagine gallery, geared towards children between five and 11, landscapes by Constable, Hockney and Hokusai hang beside the question: “Where are you going to go?”, while a 15th-century Swiss tapestry of mythical forest creatures and Christopher Reeve’s costume from the 1978 Superman film are among objects to prompt: “Who are you going to meet?”
These aren’t exhibits so much as enticements for young (and less young) brains to draw comparisons and see familiar objects through fresh eyes. In the pre-schoolfriendly section of the Play gallery, one cabinet shows off a series of antique silver hand mirrors at baby-crawling height.
Anything tactile but precious comes with feelable surrounds: a
John Gibson marble bust, for example, sits behind glass, but on a marble bench. The fully hands-on exhibits call on visitors to put their newly lubricated understandings of creation and design to the test. My boys, 10 and eight, lost themselves in a huge double-sided magnetic marble-run.
A section on games contains desks at which new board games can be designed alongside displays of classics – as well as an explorable Minecraft version of the museum. Upstairs, the older-skewing Design gallery, with its intuitively structured installations on furniture, coding, craftsmanship and transport, feels like a haven for creative-minded teens.
Three years ago, I worried that the boys were on the cusp of getting too old for the place. Now I foresee regular trips for the next decade.
Reopens on Sat; vam.ac.uk/young
These aren’t exhibits so much as enticements to see familiar objects through fresh eyes