On a damp autumn evening in November 2022, a group of children in pajamas, raincoats and rubber boots took to the streets of Bow, east London, to defend a play space from demolition. As council workers prepared to destroy the fenced area, students at Chisenhale Primary School climbed over plastic road barriers in protest.
In the end, the advisers were successful and the site was cleared. But on July 1, the Young V&A opened its doors and children in Tower Hamlets – indeed, all of London – now have their own fully protected space to play.
The V&A’s Museum of Childhood has been transformed from a collection focused on the material culture of childhood – that parents and grandparents (remembering with nostalgia the Playmobile and Action Men from their early years) enjoyed far more than the children – into an active, artefact-rich museum focused on building cultural confidence in the capital’s most deprived borough. And it couldn’t be revived at a more urgent time when, as Sally Bacon has revealed in these pages (The Art Newspaper, May 2023), art and design GCSEs have fallen by 60% over the past 12 years and that the pandemic has so cruelly set back the education of children. sociability, curiosity and creativity.
A building with a rich past
We do this in a much-loved building that has been reinvented many times since its iron framework – the so-called ‘Brompton Boilers’ originating from the Great Exhibition of 1851 – were transported by horse and carriage from South Kensington to build the first in east London. public museum, the Bethnal Green Museum in 1872. Since then it has served as a site for food and animal products and English costume, as well as housing the Wallace Collection and the National Portrait Gallery (until administrators deem the location “a dangerous environment for art”). In 1974, V&A director Roy Strong decided to turn it into a museum of childhood, drawing on its remarkable collections of dollhouses, puppets, rocking horses and childhood ephemera. Locally it is still known as “The Toy Museum”.
We have gone from a childhood museum to a children’s museum. It is neither a KidZania-style early childhood center nor a repository of the social history of family life, but something new: an active and co-designed museum mobilizing its collections to develop the creative capacity of 0-14 year olds. With 2,000 artifacts on display, it goes beyond toys to harness the full wealth of the V&A’s collections – from prints by David Hockney to samurai armor and recent works by a wide range of names, from designer Virgil Abloh to artist Olafur Eliasson – to inspire and delight young minds.
Advances in neuroscience mean that we know that 90% of brain development takes place before the age of five. Our Play Gallery therefore supports cognitive growth through color, sound and texture. Parents will have to take out their iPhones and play, roll and crawl with their children as they discover the treasures of South Ken. We’ve got giant sandpits and marble runs and, best of all, babies can probe the alphabet through an A-Z of V&A objects, brought to life by new poems by Michael Rosen, Valerie Bloom and children’s award winner Joseph Coelho. Here we actively encourage play, not just for the joy it brings, but because directed and focused play is the foundation of gross and fine motor skills as well as early listening and language skills.
In the Imagine Gallery, children ages 5 to 11 can tap into the V&A’s theater and performance collection to conjure up imaginary worlds, play pretend, and speculate on the secret lives that unfold in the home installation. of dolls by Rachel Whiteread. Why is this important? Because educational psychologists have shown that imaginary play and imaginary worlds fuel divergent thinking and creative production. Visitors can take part in storytelling, poetry workshops and film screenings aimed at developing vocabulary and confidence.
Finally, our new design gallery has been curated to encourage young teens to think more deeply about the nature of design and how it could offer them a career. From Bollywood posters to Notting Hill Carnival costumes to Extinction Rebellion prints, the exhibits feature objects that explore both materiality and how design can change society: giving young people a sense of agency to reshape their world. And to help them, Young V&A hosts a designer-in-residence in an open studio working with local students and after-school clubs.
Co-designed, from the start, with children, caregivers and parents, we believe Young V&A represents a truly new way to engage families, of all kinds, with home decor and artwork collections. . There aren’t too many touch screens or augmented reality headsets. Instead, we believe young people can be inspired by old things. Moreover, as AI transforms the fabric of human intelligence, it is our Bethnal Green program of research, understanding, empathy, collaboration and orality that Generation Alpha will need. Play, imagination and design are the building blocks of 21st century human capability, all of which should be encouraged, not prohibited.
• Tristram Hunt is director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London
