Oldest design museum

The oldest museum dedicated to applied arts and design is the Victoria and Albert Museum (better known as the V&A), located in Kensington, London. The V&A was first opened as the "Museum of Ornamental Manufactures" on 18 May 1852, with a temporary exhibition that occupied ten rooms of Marlborough House, London. Initially, much of its collection comprised items that had been exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition.

The museum was moved to Somerset House in September of 1852, and on 20 June 1857 the collection moved to its current site in "Albertopolis" – the neighbourhood of grand museums and public buildings established in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition. The museum's collection grew rapidly, as did visitor numbers, forcing the museum – by then known as the South Kensington Museum – to construct new buildings to create more space. This meant that, ironically, a museum dedicated to the decorative arts was housed in a series of famously ugly buildings: huge steel warehouse-like structures nicknamed the "Brompton Boilers". The Italianate buildings that house the museum today were completed in 1899 and opened by Queen Victoria herself in a ceremony that included the announcement of its current name.

The V&A was a pioneering institution in many ways. Its founding director envisioned the museum as a "schoolroom for everyone", where working Londoners could come and learn about good design. In service of this goal, the museum was fitted with gas lighting, allowing it to stay open late into the evenings so people with full-time jobs could visit. It also had the first museum café.