Victoria and Albert Museum

But I have to say, I don't think there was ever a point where...

The only thing that it used to be, I mean, I can remember I once took him, 'cause this is so typically me, is I took him to the V&A, and-

Of course you did.

Yes.

So this building really starts to become part of that and create this horizontality to it, this layered language.

It is because it's not only a collection like the V&A here.

You have laboratories for people working with living organisms.

So it is much more complex than just a storage space.

Don't waste it pretending that it isn't.

There's a pendant from around 1540 that still exists, now kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

On one side is a carved skull.

On the other, an inscription about resurrection Death on one face, hope on the other.

There's one There's a conversation between Rachel Garfield and Ojamu Iks, who's a Black British photographer, and the way that he uses his own body in photography to really liberate himself and his peers in the way that he's talking about sexuality and the male body.

And the other one is a conversation between Jacqueline Springer, who is the curator of the Music is Black exhibition that is up right now at the V&A, which is really the story of black music in Britain.

Brilliant show.

And she has interviewed Celeste Bell, the daughter of Polly Styrene.

I went to every single atelier that I could ever possibly find.

You know, you go to like the original Olaya and of course in London, like the Victorian Albert Museum and of course the National Portrait Gallery and you see like Cecil Beaton and you see the Marie Antoinette exhibition.

I sobbed.

I was like, this is, and somehow they recovered her guillotine.

It's about an hour and a half from where I live.

And he and I and his brother-in-law, Michael Dillon, spent a happy summer painting and Alec was designing and we were painting these extraordinary display cases that were installed in an old unused large room at the castle to display probably one of the best collections of Indian artefacts outside the V&A but now you know troubled by all the association of the way in which it was acquired which was because the grandson of Robert Clive or Clive of India as he's sometimes known had married the heiress of Powys Castle and all the artefacts that he had been given in inverted commas, had come to Perth.

But as a collection, they were incredibly informative, and Alec's approach was to present them in an Anglo-Indian style, and the style of a private museum.

And the

It took him 180 glass plate negatives to capture the entire 231 feet.

These plates were stored in the South Kensington Museum, a museum that's now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The first life-size hand-colored print made from them was prominently displayed at the 1873 International Exhibition in London.

It subsequently joined the permanent galleries of the South Kensington Museum so that the British public would be able to view it.

In 1875, the Arundel Society published the photographs as a commercial portfolio entitled The Biotapestry Reproduced in Autotype Plates, allowing schools, art institutions, and private collectors to buy and view them.

Back in France, the Bayeux Tapestry was moved in 1913 to a new display room in the former Episcopal Palace in Bayeux.

So I always had the aim to build a middle-scale theatre, but this opportunity came along.

And so we're now, alongside the V&A, the BBC, London College of Fashion and UCL, we're here to make a difference to this part of the city.

But Sadler's Wells, it means we can show lots more dance on a slightly smaller scale.

It's a 550-seat theatre, but there are six studios.

We are all working together.

to make that happen.

And so I'll give you an example is the first exhibition at the V&A, the new V&A is the history of black music in Britain.

And we've had a couple of weekends of music and then dance as well as related to that history.