The Victoria and Albert Museum, the UK's national museum of art, design and performance, with sites in South Kensington, east London, Dundee and Stoke-on-Trent.
The V&A is a family of museums built around the world's biggest collections of art and design, now with several sites in the UK. Its main home is South Kensington in London, and it also runs Young V&A, the V&A East Storehouse and the V&A East Museum in London, plus V&A Dundee in Scotland. The V&A East Storehouse opened in Stratford's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in May 2025 as a working museum store, with over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives that visitors can ask to see. It also houses the David Bowie Centre, which holds more than 90,000 items from his archive.
We did not find a mission statement for the V&A as a whole on the pages we could read. V&A Dundee describes itself as "Scotland's design museum, on a mission to inspire and empower through design", and says it wants to enrich lives through design, bring design from around the world to Scotland and give Scottish designers a platform. It is run with founding partners Dundee City Council, Scottish Enterprise, the University of Dundee, Abertay University and the V&A. In its first five years it welcomed over 1.7 million visitors and engaged 270,000 people through learning.
The V&A East Museum opened to the public on 18 April 2026 as the V&A's sixth site. It has five storeys, two permanent "Why We Make" galleries with more than 500 objects, a temporary exhibition space and learning facilities, and its opening show, The Music Is Black: A British Story, runs until 3 January 2027. Wikipedia also lists a V&A branch at Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, which holds the Wedgwood Collection. V&A Dundee's own page calls itself the only V&A museum outside London, so sources differ on how to count the sites; Dundee is the first dedicated design museum in Scotland.
On culture, the Dundee museum says it is developing a warmer, more welcoming visitor experience, and has an LGBTQ+ staff network exploring ways to make the museum more inclusive. A £2.6 million UK Government grant is paying for a redesign of its free Scottish Design Galleries, ahead of the museum's tenth birthday in 2028. We did not read a people and culture page for the wider V&A, so those details come from the Dundee site only.
Museums like these employ curators who research the collections, conservators who care for objects, learning teams who work with schools and families, exhibition designers, collections and archive staff, visitor-experience teams, shops, cafes and events staff, and people in marketing, digital, fundraising and finance. The Storehouse model, where visitors order objects to see them, also needs collections-management and research specialists. If you love design, making or history, look at the jobs pages for each site, as Dundee has its own.
Website: www.vam.ac.uk
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