For a museum aimed at children, the V&A’s Museum of Childhood has never felt very much like fun. Standing like an imposing Victorian workhouse in London’s Bethnal Green, its cavernous interior has always had the air of a mausoleum of toys, with stacks of dusty games sealed disappointingly behind glass. Rows of Victorian doll’s houses and their haunted inhabitants stared out from sombre ranks of vitrines, in a way that seemed more geared towards antique collectors than kids. As its name suggests, it was a place where childhood went to die, providing a trip down memory lane for parents and grandparents, while their own children longed to be taken to the soft play centre.
All that has changed. After a three-year, £13m makeover, the cobwebs have been well and truly blown away, the gloomy building injected with dazzling new energy and a mischievous sense of fun – now fittingly rebranded as Young V&A.
“It’s about stimulating creativity, curiosity and ingenuity,” says Philippa Simpson, the V&A’s director of design, estate and public programme. “We want to encourage the next generation of designers, makers and doers – not be a nostalgia fest for parents.”
The project is the work of architects De Matos Ryan (DMR), who were responsible for the main structural changes, and AOC, which handled the interiors and exhibition design. Both conducted intensive months-long residencies and co-design workshops in the museum to determine what local families and schools wanted the place to be, engaging a staggering 22,000 people. The overwhelming response? “More light, more colour, more pattern, more sound!” says AOC’s Gill Lambert. In short, the place needed more zing.
The youthful buzz begins on the outside, where a bold, storey-high V&A logo now perches atop the stone entrance pavilion, trumpeting the museum’s presence at full volume in bright minty blue. Crucially, it’s visible when you come out of the tube station across the street, the sight-lines aided by the removal of a thick hedge and the arrival of a big steel arch, beckoning you in from the pavement.
Once inside, the entrance has been jazzed up several notches. A black and white striped portal frames the view into the central hall – now flooded with daylight, the skylights unblocked for the first time in decades – while cosy nooks have been added to the buggy park, ideal for calming tantrums, and windowsills upholstered with comfy seats. The shop has been moved into the lobby to free the voluminous hall, which has been rethought as a “town square”, ringed with a continuous bench made of London Plane wood, giving it the generous spirit of an Italian piazza. There is a cafe (run by the ubiquitous Benugo), but you’re welcome to bring your own food and hang out among the pink and yellow cushions, whose playful forms were inspired by the building’s arches and roof trusses. It now feels like one of London’s great indoor public spaces, a British Museum great court ruled by the under-15s.
The museum previously underwent a careful renovation in 2006, in the hands of Caruso St John, which brought its usual rigour but left the place a bit lifeless. It added the temple-like entrance pavilion and painted the interior ironwork in 50 shades of pinkish beige (“a gradient of dirty knickers,” says one staff member) but, with the roof-lights blocked out, it had a sepulchral dreariness. It was good taste, not good fun. Now, supersized letters in bright red, yellow, and teal burst out from the balconies, signposting the three new galleries of Play, Imagine and Design. A totemic spiral staircase, by DMR, has been installed at the far end, its mirrored facets giving it the look of a climbable kaleidoscope, reflecting the excitements that await upstairs. The architects have ditched the manners and gone for it full throttle.
The Play gallery, notionally aimed at 0-5-year-olds (but enjoyed by this 38-year-old), is an unbridled fantasy of tactile materials, conceived as a “textural landscape” where rough and smooth collide with things bumpy and scaly, fuzzy and furry, sparkly and shiny. A leaning cone of green marble (part real stone, part painted to look like it) leads you into a low-level world where objects are displayed at crawling height, and spaces are linked by tunnels of astroturf and pink fur. A domed display case with the look of a mirror-polished R2-D2 houses a collection of historic mirrors, a diamante-encrusted boot sparkles beneath a sequined column, while a mysterious “sound tree” houses an interactive game, spied through peepholes. There are benches and seating nooks aplenty, a thought spared for tired parents and over-stimulated kids, with places to rest both centre stage and more secluded from the action.
A section on games includes a make-your-own board game table, displays about the design of video games, and a playable Minecraft version of the museum itself, housed in a space with a lo-fi pixelated carpet. Nearby, a momentous gilded portal leads to a giant foam construction set, while a mesmerising “sand spinner” combines sandpit and potter’s wheel, and a big magnetic marble run encourages collaboration and intergenerational play. Museum fatigue is avoided and the pace kept up by the continuous change in colour and texture, openness and enclosure – with a mind-boggling 111 different materials specified throughout. “Our studio became one big sample library,” laughs Lambert, with magpie glee. The fun the designers had is evident, and infectious.
Across the hall in the Imagine gallery (aimed at 5-11-year-olds), a little theatre-like room has been created, cleverly straddling what was a staircase, where deep crimson carpet covers a stage and steps – providing a perfect place for breastfeeding, as one visiting mum comments. A dressing-up wardrobe encourages kids to perform alongside film clips from the archive, while a circular projector provides a place for shadow puppetry, the whole thing contained in a corrugated oval pavilion, and offset with fluorescent yellow columns.
The doll’s house collection has been imaginatively redeployed in street form, so you can walk between the houses, set at varying heights, some now with interactive elements too. Nearby, a tiny window provides views into a surreal living room, where with a clever trick of perspectival stagecraft, visitors can become giants or dwarfs depending on which side of the floor they stand. There is nothing like seeing the thrill in a toddler’s eyes of being able to tower over their parents.
Upstairs, the Design gallery is intended as the domain of 11-14 year-olds, providing inspiration for those choosing their GCSE options, but there’s plenty to entertain younger visitors too. There’s an engaging wall on urban mobility and the design of scooters, along with a mini factory that sheds light on myriad manufacturing processes behind everyday objects. Its cartoonish sawtooth form is clad in corrugated hemp panelling, one of the many environmentally friendly touches, including displays made from upcycled cupboard doors and other materials salvaged from previous V&A exhibitions (part of the museum’s zero landfill policy). The terrazzo work surface in the open studio area is made of rubble from the building site, while other plastic surfaces feature flecks of foil, revealing their previous life as yoghurt pots. There’s also a big new gallery for temporary exhibitions (opening with Japan: Myths to Manga in October), while downstairs stretches a whole world of learning studios and quiet reading areas, glimpsed through new mirror-lined arched openings in the main hall.
As we tour the lively levels, I keep spotting further creative details, from the foam-finger signage (designed by Graphic Thought Facility), to little smiley faces hidden in door mouldings, to the street art mural wrapping the lift shaft, to the animated neon sign pointing towards the loos – the kinds of things that will entrance those beady, younger, detail-obsessed eyes. Every single surface and corner has been meticulously thought through, every junction embraced an opportunity to spark a little more delight. It is a tour de force of care, exhibiting a level of attention to detail rarely found in the built environment. What if buildings for grownups could be this joyful and inspiring too?
The Young V&A opens 1 July in London, free entry.
