Young V&A

London, United Kingdom

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Young V&A

London, United Kingdom

Firm

AOC

Type

Cultural › Museum

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2023

SIZE

25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft

BUDGET

$10M - 50M

AOC Architecture and De Matos Ryan have transformed the former Museum of Childhood in east London to create Young V&A, the UK’s first national museum built with and for young people.

The 5,200sqm redeveloped Grade II* listed museum is both a world-class centre of creativity and an essential public building for the local community. Over 20,000 people were involved in an ambitious co-design process to ensure that the museum serves the needs and ambitions of its audiences. Co-creation defined the development of Young V&A; from the ambition to create ‘the most joyful museum in the world’ to the direct development of the colour palette, from testing user-led concept installations to curating specific contents of co-produced displays.

The building has been stripped back to reveal its original form and celebrate its historic features. Natural light has been reinstated through the main linear rooflight, returning this 19th century top-lit museum to its original state. New interventions redefine the visitor journey and enhance the character of the original building. Improved acoustics and enhanced environmental controls safeguard the heritage asset and its collections.

The building’s central ‘Town Square’ provides a generous civic interior for Bethnal Green, surrounded by three permanent galleries containing 2,000 world-class objects from the V&A collection and a temporary exhibition gallery. A new Kaleidoscope stair, lift and accessible ramp transform the circulation to create an inclusive visitor experience. The historic monochromatic mosaic floor has been restored and fully revealed. The grandeur of the town square is tempered with a London Plane perimeter bench, a family of soft elements and new café furniture. The redeveloped foyer provides a generous welcome with a convenient buggy park and an extensive new shop with added window seats. The lower ground floor has been restructured to provide a suite of workshops and learning spaces, improved back of house spaces and a changing places facility.

A series of figurative enclosures and playful totems have been introduced into the open volumes of the surrounding gallery floors to create a diverse range of experiences whilst maintaining visual connections throughout the building. The gallery names - Play, Imagine, Design - are writ large in redolent materials, enabling visitors to understand the museum in a single glance. The careful arrangement of enclosures and cases allow the galleries to enjoy extensive daylight whilst conserving the collection.

Young V&A has circular economy at its heart. New structures on the first floor sample the roof trusses and historic ‘Brompton Boilers’ cladding profile to create new structures evocative of east London’s industrial heritage. Their expressed components, designed for future re-assembly, are clad in corrugated sheets of low-carbon hemp fibre panels with sugar-based resin made entirely from agricultural waste. Museum showcases from both sites have been repurposed and carefully adapted for new displays. Timber from former gallery storage has been reused for new display tables, reclaimed timber studs from temporary exhibitions has been reused for support structures and masonry rubble from the building adaptation works has been reused to make terrazzo for new worktops.

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Young V&A

London, United Kingdom

Young V&A

London, United Kingdom

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