V&A drops financial ties with Sackler family over links with opioids

Artist Nan Goldin with protestors in 2017 at the V&A's Sackler Centre calling for the museum to remove the name from the wing. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

The Victoria and Albert Museum has bowed to growing pressure to rename key areas of its Kensington site, the Observer has learned, as it drops controversial ties with the Sackler family, benefactors descended from the American makers of addictive opioid prescription drugs.

This weekend the signs that directed V&A visitors to the Sackler Centre for Arts Education, and to the £2m tiled “Sackler Courtyard” on Exhibition Road, have gone, as the museum finally jettisons its damaging association with the opioid drug market.