Am I at the Right V&A?

A plan for visiting England's enormous family of museums dedicated to art, design, and so much more.

- BY NORMAN VANAMEE

The Victoria and Albert, England’s museum dedicated to art and design, has always been a catchall. It opened in 1852 after London’s Great Exhibition as a place to permanently display some of that fair’s collected works. Over the years its mission and galleries, not to mention collections, have grown at a remarkable rate. “An extremely capacious handbag,” Sir Roy Strong, the V&A’s director from 1973 to 1987, once called it. Today it’s a family of museums stretching across London and to the near reaches of the empire.