The South Kensington Museum in context: an alternative history

Abstract

The South Kensington Museum—now the Victoria and Albert Museum—has a complex history. Founded in 1857 as an omnibus museum of art and industry—a condensation of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in all its abundance—it had a bewildering variety of possible futures ahead of it, including failure (or existence as an adjunct to a café, as one infamous ad campaign suggested twenty years ago).2 Yet the history of the museum has generally been written teleologically and typologically, as though it were both inevitable and obvious that it should turn into an art museum. The figure behind this foregone development is Henry Cole (aided by a few of his curators), who is perceived as rather quickly subjugating the conflicting possible directions of the museum to the goal of making art available for the public. I would like to offer a sketch of a different history here, one that sees the context of the museum not in the field of other like museums but in its location, both physical and institutional, on the land owned by the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and in the Education Department.