There was, I seem to remember, a TV quiz in which the contestants watched the prizes - toasters, stereos, food-mixers - go by on a conveyer belt. The new British Galleries 1500-1900 at the V&A are put together on the same principle. Except, of course, that the goodies are stationary and you walk the length of two floors of corridor-like galleries, admiring them. The things you see are oddly familiar. It's as if the quizmaster had whipped round your own house to find the prizes - which in a sense is what has happened. This is a rearrangement of part of the V&A's permanent collection, to show some of our (the nation's) finest things, familiar both from past installation and frequent illustration. Arrangement and labelling are appropriately, if unrelentingly informative. We are shown, period by period, the clothes, furnishings, crockery and knick-knacks our ancestors - the best-off of them anyway - had about them.

LRB 13 December 2001 | PDF Download