The problem with the V&A
Spread across seven miles of galleries in South Kensington, the V&A owns more than 2.8 million objects, from Roman glass to Vivienne Westwood dresses. Nobody sees it in one afternoon, and the people who try end up with the same souvenir: sore feet and a blurred memory of corridors. The answer is not to see less badly but to see better. Pick the rooms that have no equivalent anywhere else in London, move in one direction, and let the building do the rest.
Plan the afternoon before you queue
Enter through the Exhibition Road entrance on the museum's west side; it is wider, calmer and closer to the Cast Courts than the grand Cromwell Road door. The museum is open daily from 10:00 to 17:45, with late opening until 22:00 on Fridays, and general admission is free with a suggested donation of around £5. If you arrive after 13:30 you will mostly miss the school groups. Use the free cloakroom immediately — the V&A's best rooms are upstairs and the bag will weigh on you otherwise. Take the stairs at the north end of the entrance hall; the lift is slow and you will want the route to unfold in order.
Start in the Cast Courts
These two vast, high-ceilinged rooms are the reason the V&A has no real rival. Built in the 1870s to hold plaster copies of Europe's great monuments, they are dominated by full-size reproductions of Trajan's Column, cut into two stacked halves, and of the portal of Santiago de Compostela. The plaster is pale, the scale is absurd, and standing beneath the column is one of the strangest museum experiences in London — it looks like a film set until you remember it is a teaching tool from a century and a half ago. Give it twenty minutes, most of it spent walking slowly backwards.
The Medieval & Renaissance rooms
Follow the corridor south into the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, which run along the museum's west side. The rooms are dense with carved wood, armour, enamels and altarpieces, and the trick is to skip the first two and stop at the ones holding the tapestries and the ivory. The star here is the Great Bed of Ware — a four-poster bed carved around 1590, big enough for four couples, which Shakespeare mentioned and which has survived fire, tourism and a spell in a Hertfordshire inn. It sits in the British galleries slightly further on, so save the last of your attention for it.
Jewellery and Fashion, the two showstoppers
Two rooms deserve a scheduled stop. The William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery, on the north side of the building, is a dark, spot-lit treasury of rings, tiaras and necklaces from antiquity to the present day, and it is the single most-asked-about room in the museum. Five minutes in here is enough; ten is better. Nearby, the Fashion galleries track two centuries of dress, from a Spitalfields silk gown to the designers who followed, and the cases are rotated regularly, so every visit surfaces something new. These two rooms are where the V&A's reputation was built, and they are the ones people remember on the train home.
The British galleries and the exit
Finish with the British galleries to catch the Great Bed of Ware, then drift back toward the Exhibition Road entrance through the ceramics and silver, which you can take at a stroll. If time allows, the garden at the back of the building is a free, quiet courtyard with a café, and Friday nights extend the day enough for a second pass at the jewellery when the crowds have thinned. Exit the way you came, stop in the shop only if you must, and resist the urge to double back — the afternoon route works because it never asks you to retrace a single step.
