ABSTRACT
During its history, the European Museum of the Year Award has rarely been conferred on the biggest and most celebrated museums, especially the art museums, consequently the British Galleries constitute an exception. There is a reason for that: in the early 1980s the Victoria and Albert Museum started an important plan of renovation of a relatively small part of its vast exhibition space. These were the British Galleries, which offered a historical perspective from the middle ages to the 1930s on applied arts pieces created in Great Britain. It is a fascinating journey in the history of design and of social life presented with an original combination of artefacts with excellent interpretation and Discovery Areas where visitors are invited to ‘take action’ in the museum space, engaging with replicas and objects in a way that for great traditional museums was rather radical for the time.
