Ceramics Galleries

The V&A has made a glorious job of the (entirely privately funded) £11 million redisplay of its unrivalled china collection. A chain of galleries spanning the museum's sixth floor has been opened up to allow natural light to pour in, revealing displays designed to let the collection breath and individual treasures shine.

Orientate yourself by checking out the central gallery where a ceramic timeline starts with a remarkable Japanese pot dating from 3500BC and highlights include Ming dynasty Chinese porcelain and a vase painted by Picasso - but don't try to see everything; there's much more here than you can possibly absorb in a single visit.

There's a room devoted to factory-made twentieth-century work by Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff among others, a room exploring handmade ceramics by Bernard Leach and more recent twentieth-century potters, a gallery of architectural ceramics and space for temporary shows, currently devoted to prissy eighteenth-century French porcelain.

Adding a touch of high drama to the domed gallery that will host a changing display of work by contemporary artists is a site-specific installation, 'Signs and Wonders' by Edmund de Waal (look up, or you'll miss it).

The V&A's old china galleries offered nothing in the way of interpretation, an approach that has been rectified by the inclusion of large gallery devoted to illuminating the process of making ceramics. A hands-on area explains the basics of moulding, firing and decorating pots, while illuminating case studies provide more depth.

The gallery also has its own ceramics workshop, complete with potter's wheels and a kiln, where a ceramicist in residence can run masterclasses and family events. This gallery also contains a reconstruction of a corner of the studio of the influential twentieth-century potter Lucie Rie. It's intriguing to see the moulds Rie used to make the ceramic buttons she produced to help keep the wolf from the door immediately after World War II, and this calm, orderly workspace is a wonderful contrast to the chaos that characterises a similar recreation of Kylie's 'Showgirl' tour dressing room in the museum's Theatre Galleries, which opened earlier this year.

Around 3,000 items are now on display in these seven galleries. When Phase II opens in 2010 a further 24,000 will see the light of day, in four much more densely packed galleries designed to appeal to the scholars who in earlier years made up the bulk of the visitors to the V&A's remarkable ceramic holdings.