Page "Victoria and Albert Museum" Paragraph 38

In the immediate post-war years there was little money available for other than essential repairs.

The 1950s and early 1960s saw little in the way of building work, the first major work was the creation of new storage space for books in the Art Library in 1966 and 1967.

This involved flooring over Aston Webb's main hall to form the book stacks, with a new medieval gallery on the ground floor ( now the shop, opened in 2006 ).

Then the lower ground floor galleries in the south west part of the museum were redesigned, opening in 1978 to form the new galleries covering Continental art 1600 – 1800 ( late Renaissance, Baroque through Rococo and neo-Classical ).

In 1974 the museum had acquired what is now the Henry Cole wing from the Royal College of Science.

In order to adapt the building as galleries, all the Victorian interiors except for the staircase were recast during the remodelling.

To link this to the rest of the museum, a new entrance building was constructed on the site of the former boiler house, the intended site of the Spiral, between 1978 and 1982.

This building is of concrete and very functional, the only embellishment being the iron gates by Christopher Hay and Douglas Coyne of the Royal College of Art.

These are set in the columned screen wall designed by Aston Webb that forms the façade.