Curtains Up Exhibition. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The Victoria and Albert Museum based on Cromwell Road in London is the world's leading museum of art and design, where it houses a permanent collection of 2.3 million objects that span over 5,00 years of human creativity and imagination.
The V&A was originally established in 1852, after an enormous success of the Great Exhibition the year before. It's founding principle was to create works of art available to all, to educate the working society and to inspire British designers and manufacturers.
The Museum contains many of the UK's national collections and also houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.
The V&A is such a stunning building and if I had more time in the day then I would have totally immersed myself within all the walls of the museum. There was so much to see but I had come to see one exhibition in particular before it went.
Curtains Up: Celebrating 40 Years of Theatre in London and New York captures a true celebration of skill that goes into creating the stage. The display immerses you into all of the excitement that live performance carries with it behind the scenes and there is something intriguing for you to look at every way you turn.
The exhibition was created by acclaimed stage designer Tom Piper and RFK Architects.
There was so much on display that I longed to see, from Joey the Horse from War Horse to a set model of Matilda The Musical.
I completely immersed myself in all this exhibition could provide and a taster of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time set was a definite good touch. Since reading the book earlier in the year I've been really inspired to go and see the play so this was a good taster of what I could expect.
I also decided to have a mooch around the Theatre and Performance area of the museum itself and I loved seeing all that they collected for us to look at. The model of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane was really captivating and interesting. There was also show posters hung on the wall which has definitely inspired a space in my office as I have collected so many theatre programmes over the year and would love a way to show them off instead of storing them away in a box never to be looked at.
I can't wait to re-attend this museum in January with my mum as I know she would love this stuff just as much as I do. There's so much on offer at the Victoria and Albert Museum and I would definitely urge anybody to go and give it a look around.
It also has a lovely area outside that you can go and sit in if it's a nice day, which is always a winner because a museum needs a nice area to relax after walking around.