Halls, the areas occupied by the shop and Asian Galleries as well as the
Costume Gallery. The interior makes much use of marble in the entrance hall
and flanking staircases, although the galleries as originally designed were
white with restrained classical detail and mouldings, very much in contrast to
the elaborate decoration of the Victorian galleries, although much
The Museum survived the Second World War with only minor bomb
damage. The worst loss was the Victorian stained glass on the Ceramics
Staircase, which was blown in when bombs fell nearby; pock marks still
visible on the façade of the museum were caused by shrapnel from the bombs.
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.
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