Sir Tristram Hunt: 'Here is the brilliance, eccentricity, liberty and skill of the English’

Of course, I would make the case for the V&A Museum as the very essence of Englishness. First of all, thanks to the engaging modesty of our monarchs, the museum was initially christened the South Kensington Museum and Queen Victoria had to be convinced by courtiers to rechristen it in their joint name (she only wanted Albert to be honoured). Not for us the grand royal, then state collections of Paris, Madrid or Vienna; instead, an incremental, iterative, constitutional settlement based upon consent and civil society. In many ways, a museological reflection of our relative political stability.

The V&A, too, was built from the profits of one of England’s great gifts to global culture and commerce: the Great Exhibition of 1851, on which so many world fairs have later been based. Held in Hyde Park beneath Joseph Paxton’s 19-acre steel and glass Crystal Palace, it brought together 34 nations and more than 100,000 designed products from almost 14,000 exhibitors.

With its focus on an English trinity of free trade, cultural exchange and international law, it sought to promote the circulation of goods, people and ideas. Every World Expo since then owes a debt to Prince Albert’s Hyde Park extravaganza.

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Then come the remarkable V&A collections. From Nottingham alabaster to the Dacre beasts of Northumberland to the Elizabethan miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard to the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron to the fashion of Alexander McQueen to the paintings of Frank Bowling, here is all the brilliance, eccentricity, liberty and craft skill of the English.

As our current exhibition star, Elsa Schiaparelli, once put it: ‘I love the English, because they are mad, mad, mad.’ All of these treasures are enclosed in a typically English architectural medley of curious additions, organic growth and public spiritedness.

The initial fabric of the V&A was composed of old boiler rooms from the Great Exhibition, then a red-brick and terracotta courtyard overseen by the Corps of Royal Engineers, followed by the English Baroque entrance on Cromwell Road and, most recently, our porcelain courtyard on Exhibition Road — the design of which envelopes both the Royal Coat of Arms and preserves the bomb damage from the Second World War, which certainly still shapes English identity.

However, this is a story of English radicalism, as well as royal tradition — for the designing and decorating of the early V&A was handed over to a cadre of young artists and craftspeople, who saw the importance of museums as civic spaces in an era of growing democratic rights. Leading the charge was William Morris, who had been appalled at the mass-produced ugliness on show in the Great Exhibition and, instead, developed a counter-cultural world view of harmony, fellowship and beauty. His designs for the museum’s tearoom — what could be more English? — put that philosophy into practice with an Arts-and-Crafts aesthetic, which would later inform his willow wallpaper patterns and, in the process, define such a celebrated English household idiom.

Today, with sites at V&A Dundee and the Wedgwood Collection in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the V&A is also a proudly British institution, showcasing art and design from across the UK. Yet we remain forever and proudly alert to those English characteristics of individuality, eccentricity, creativity and incremental iteration that are particular attributes of this wonderful country and its people.

Sir Tristram Hunt is a historian, author and director of the V&A Museum, London SW7, and a past Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent

For what being English means to Tom Parker Bowles, click here

For what being English means to Sir John Major, click here

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe