London’s Museum of Childhood is undergoing refurbishment and will be renamed as the Young V&A. Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which runs the childhood branch, said that it is much more fundamental than simply a change of name.
“It is to signal a complete transformation in its purpose from a museum about the social history of childhood to one focussed on building confidence, cultural capital and design skills,” Hunt tells The Art Newspaper. He is no longer setting out to appeal to adults “reveling in nostalgia with objects in glass cases” and rather being “much more focussed on the needs of children and young teenagers”. The target audience is those aged up to 14 years old.
The museum opened in 1872 with the name the Bethnal Green Museum which displayed various collections. then the museum was turned into the Museum of Childhood by the V&A’s director Roy Strong in 1974. Its building was last renovated in 2003-06, with a new entrance, in a £5m project.
The total cost for the current refurbishment will be £13m, of which two thirds has been raised (including a donation from the UK’s Wolfson Foundation). Fundraising has been challenging with Covid-19, but Hunt is confident that it will be achieved.
The Museum of Childhood had been due to close in May 2020, but was closed in March due to pandemic. The 35,000 objects stored there have now been taken to the main V&A museum in South Kensington.
The refurbishment and redisplay have been designed by two London firms, De Matos Ryan and AOC Architecture. There will be a similar area of display space as before the closure, presenting around 2,000 objects. The main galleries are to be named “Imagine”, “Play” and “Design”, and there will be a new temporary exhibition space. Hunt also expects the main V&A museum will lend appropriate objects, such as Samurai suits and Hockney prints.
Building work should start next month and Young V&A is due to open in summer 2023. This is just over a year later than anticipated, largely due to Covid-19.
Gina Koutsika, the Museum of Childhood director, left the museum in July, to be replaced by Helen Charman, previously the V&A’s director of learning and national programmes. Before its closure, the museum was attracting around 350,000 visitors a year, but Hunt hopes that the number will now rise to 550,000.
