In the editorial in the last issue of this Magazine we commented on the proposal by the management of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), to restructure its curatorial departments along chronological lines as part of a plan to deal with the deficit caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea of dispensing with a materials-based curatorial structure for the first time since the museum’s foundation – a proposal arrived at without consultation with the curators – aroused such a storm of protest both internally and externally that within a month the management changed its mind.

At present the museum is organised into eight departments. One, Asia, has a geographical remit, the other seven are materials-based: Design, Architecture and Digital; Furniture, Textiles and Fashion; Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass; Theatre and Performance; Word and Image, which includes the National Art Library (NAL); Photography; and the V&A Research Institute (VARI). Under the original proposals these seven departments would have been replaced by three: Medieval to Revolution; The Long 19th Century; and Modern and Contemporary.

The structure now being put forward consists of five curatorial departments. Asia remains, although extended – as was proposed from the outset – with new curatorial responsibility for African collections. The other four departments are Sculpture and the Applied Arts (ceramics, metalwork, glass and jewellery); Furniture, Fashion and Textiles and Theatre and Performance; Graphic Art and Design, Photography and Architecture; and VARI with the NAL and the V&A Archives under a new post, a Director of Research. Although the abandonment of the proposed chronological structure is greatly to be welcomed, the hard truth remains that there has been no change in the insistence on the need to reduce the curatorial staff by twenty per cent in order to address an expected £10 million structural deficit across the museum as a whole. The consultation period for the restructuring, originally set to close on 31st March, has been extended to 23rd April. By the time the V&A reopens to the public after lockdown with the rest of the nation’s museums, on 17th May, its new structure will probably have been confirmed, with one important exception, the National Art Library.

It is hardly necessary to explain the significance of the library to the readers of this Magazine. With its origins in the library of the Government School of Design, founded in 1837, it is older than the V&A. With the school (which was to become the Royal College of Art) it moved to the present museum site in South Kensington in 1857. Although remaining integrated into the museum, in 1865 it was renamed the National Art Library, emphasising its independent identity. Its core role in the V&A’s activities is emphasised by its physical centrality: the library’s two reading rooms, built in 1877–83, form the first floor of the south range of the museum’s quadrangle and stand at the head of its original principal staircase. In common with the rest of this phase of the museum, the library was designed by Henry Scott, although its fitting out and decoration were largely entrusted to his assistant Reuben Townroe. The fittings, made by George Trollope & Sons, are well preserved, thanks to the library having escaped the museum’s twentieth-century campaigns of de-Victorianisation of its galleries.

The new independent identity of the library and its handsome accommodation helped encourage the collections to grow to become what is in effect the national collection of the book as art as well as of books on art. The richness in depth of the NAL was described in an excellent book published by the museum in 2014, Word & Image: Art, Books and Design from the National Art Library, and one can scarcely do better than quote from its blurb: from the nineteenth century the library developed into ‘a new kind of bibliographical resource’ with collections that range from ‘a fifteenth-century book of hours to William Morris’s specimen pages for Jean Froissart’s The Chronicles of Fraunce, Inglande, and Other Places Adjoynynge; from George Cruikshank’s studies of Fagin for Oliver Twist to an Yves Saint Laurent design for the House of Dior; and from Bill Brandt’s photographs to the Book of Nails by Floating Concrete Octopus’. There can be few art historians active in Britain who have not made use of its resources, yet many may well be unaware that it holds, for example, a large collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts and no fewer than five notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci as well as the papers of artists, designers and architects.

As originally proposed, the NAL would have lost two-thirds of its thirty staff and been closed for a year to allow for a ‘root-and-branch’ review that would ‘determine service delivery requirements, responding to a redesigned V&A, public demand and digitisation priorities’. The outcry this caused prompted another speedy rethink by the museum’s management. The library is now to be closed for six months and the extension of the Government’s job retention scheme has allowed the museum to furlough the entire staff for that period, so deferring the decision about redundancies. There is a promise that a digital library service, answering queries from researchers, will be maintained, and physical access to the collections may be provided on a case by case basis. In order to formulate detailed plans for the library’s future an outside consultant is to be appointed on a short-term contract. It is to be hoped that this person will consult as widely as possible with external stakeholders as well as library and museum staff.

One rather puzzling aspect of the original proposals for the NAL is apparently still under consideration. This is an intention, as set out in internal documents, to transform the larger of its two reading rooms into a publicly accessible ‘Reading Room of the Arts’, described as ‘a space to study, read or pause, surrounded by the magnificent historic collections of the nation’s foremost art library’. Only the smaller of the reading rooms would be reserved for researchers. It is hard to see how this change can be achieved without radically compromising the NAL’s function as a research library. The reading rooms are not large – together they have space for only around 120 readers at any one time. What purpose would a Reading Room of the Arts serve over and above the existing access to the NAL’s collections, which has always been readily granted? The historic interiors described above form part of a Grade I listed building and it is unlikely – as the unhappy example of the British Museum’s round reading room demonstrates – that permission would easily be obtained for the readers’ desks to be removed to allow increased casual access. Money would be far better spent on a well-funded programme of digitisation for the NAL that would allow its collections to be shared with an immensely larger audience than visitors to the museum. We look forward to learning in six months’ time the nature of the commitment the V&A intends to make to the NAL and trust that adequate resources will be allocated to allow it to retain its pre-eminent role in art education and scholarship.