Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum, known to everyone as the V&A, is the world's largest museum of art, design and performance. It grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the conviction of Prince Albert and Henry Cole that ordinary people and working designers should be able to study the best objects ever made. The result is a collection of more than two million things: sculpture, furniture, ceramics, glass, textiles, fashion, jewellery, metalwork, photographs, prints, theatre costume and architecture, gathered from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas across five thousand years.

The South Kensington building is a small city of galleries, courtyards and staircases, richly decorated in Victorian terracotta, mosaic and tile. Galleries are organised partly by place and period, as in the British Galleries, the Medieval and Renaissance rooms and the Islamic and South Asian galleries, and partly by material, as in the ceramics, glass, silver, ironwork and jewellery galleries on the upper floors. The vast Cast Courts hold full-size plaster copies of Europe's most famous monuments, and the John Madejski Garden at the centre offers a place to rest.

Entry to the permanent collection is free. First-time visitors should accept that they cannot see everything and choose two or three areas. The museum's charm lies as much in stumbling on the unexpected, a Renaissance chapel, a Frank Lloyd Wright office, a room of Chinese lacquer, as in finding the famous pieces.