The V&A in Kensington, London, is my favourite haunt for inspiration in my art. I have been visiting it and drawing from the exhibits for many years, and the notion of using it as a setting for a story was one of the earliest sparks of inspiration for 'A World Invisible'.
It wasn't always the V&A, of course. When exhibits from the Great Exhibition formed the original collection it was called the Museum of Manufactures and occupied a different site. When it moved to its present site in 1857, it was renamed the South Kensington Museum, and only when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the new main entrance did it become known as the Victoria and Albert Museum
The Ironwork Gallery, black and white and airy, still holds the spiralling candlestick that began the story.
Keys.... and Candlesticks
Ivory cabinet
From its inception, the Museum has been in a constant state of change, new galleries and the reorganisation of existing ones refreshing it again and again. In setting some of my scenes there I knew I was running the risk that the book would become out of date.
Still, I think I was unlucky with the Hunting Tapestries. For as long as I have known the V&A they have hung in their gloomy corridor, musty and solitary, with rarely a visitor passing through. Just Life, I suppose, that they should be removed at last, first into storage and then to be rehung in a new, wider and wonderfully-lit gallery.
Small sculpture gallery
Buffcoat and bust in the British Galleries
The Textile Study Room, with its wooden filing cabinets of glazed mounts, is unlikely to alter much, I think, although it has recently been made more accessible from the next door gallery.
There was a spin-off from writing A World Invisible which surprised me. I have always struggled to make sense of the V&A floorplan – all fourteen acres of it – and was accustomed to being surprised by stairways and passages, and suddenly coming out in a section I thought I had left behind. For the purpose of writing the novel I had to know how one gallery linked up with another, and so broke the habit of a lifetime and visited with not a sketchbook but a notebook.
I described, in words, what I saw from the main entrance hall. Then I climbed the marble staircase to the Ironwork Gallery and described that. Then, at the end of the gallery, wrote down how the stairs take you up or down to the two levels of the British Galleries. And then what happens at the opposite end of the Ironwork Gallery (Small Sculptures, if you want to know).
Then came the magic. Ever been shopping and realised as you collect your supermarket trolley that you've left your list on the kitchen table? And ever then found that you can do the whole shop without forgetting a single item? The very act of writing down words flicks a switch in your brain – well, in mine at any rate – and you don't need to read back what you've written. Back home I discovered that I could now visualise my way around the museum, and could have given instructions on how to get from, say, Musical Instruments to Architectural Drawings.
Magic.