Museums

Young V&A

The V&A's East End museum, rebuilt for children and free to walk into.

Most popularFree

The V&A is the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, the national collection of art and design: furniture, fashion, ceramics, jewellery, photographs, whole rooms lifted out of old buildings. This is its East End branch, and the building came first. The iron and glass hall was put up in South Kensington in the 1850s to hold the young museum, then taken to pieces and re-erected here in 1872, on the argument that the collections should also stand in a poor part of London.

It held the V&A's collections of childhood for decades and was known as the Museum of Childhood until 2023, when it reopened as Young V&A after a rebuild that handed the place to the people who use it. Three galleries — Play, Imagine, Design — are pitched at under-fourteens rather than at adults with children in tow: things to build, a stage to perform on, dressing up, and cases of toys, dolls' houses and puppets set at the height of the people looking at them.

Where

Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA

Nearest station

Bethnal Green · 3 min walk

Step-free access

On here now

• Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and FriendsExhibition · Until 15 November 2026

Hours

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