First in the sequence is a library holding much of the National Photographic Society collection. Visitors are surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with photography books, binders, and folios. The room also contains a key architectural intervention—a beautiful mezzanine made from a champagne-colored manganese brass alloy. Supported by a steel substructure of 28 posts, 12.6 feet in length and carefully attached to brickwork, the mezzanine and upper bookshelves align with divisions in the historic moldings on the upper walls. Wrapping the entire first space on three sides, the mezzanine is accessed by staff via a staircase at the west side of the library that sits behind a floor-to-ceiling bookcase made from metal-faced plywood. The underside of the walkways are, like the lower display cases on the east side of the room, inlaid with a veneer of rich, book-matched walnut.

There is a certain rhetorical quality to the library, the contents of which were previously displayed and stored at the National Media Museum in Bradford in the north of England and which the V&A acquired in 2016 when the original home controversially refocused its public offering toward the sciences. Here, the collection is foregrounded and celebrated; indeed the visitor, even without a ticket to the library, must walk though it to wander the galleries beyond. “We wanted the visitor or reader to feel they were surrounded by the weight of books and pictures,” says architect Matt Thornley, a weight lifted by the perfectly poised manganese brass balustrades. Along with the large globe light fixtures, these balustrades pick up the geometry of the arches that connect the rooms.

The galleries, designed to house thematic exhibitions utilizing the V&A’s collection, are more conventional. Much of the work, organized by conservation architects Purcell alongside Gibson Thornley, is intentionally invisible. Ventilation and climatic controls have been added into the ceiling and attic spaces, with new services running down the walls and concealed by a roughly 3-inch protruding plaster wall. But the fourth and final room in the series is a small coup de théâtre—a former closet for cleaning supplies that has been transformed into a camera obscura, enabling new visitors to experience, in very physical terms, the principles of photography.