V&A Director Tristram Hunt knighted by King in New Year Honours
- maxwell museums
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Tristram Hunt — Director of the V&A museum since 2017 — has been knighted by His Majesty The King in the 2026 New Year honours.
Sir Tristram has been awarded the honour for his contributions to heritage and culture and for services to museums.
During his time leading the Victoria and Albert Museum, the institution has rapidly expanded by adding three additional sites to its ‘family of museums.’
This includes the V&A East Storehouse in London’s Olympic Park which opened in May 2025 to great acclaim for its ‘open-storage’ model. The Times called it “amazing” and claimed it “feels quietly radical.” The Financial Times thinks “it may prove to be as important to the museum as Tate Modern was 25 years ago.” The V&A Dundee also opened in Scotland early in Hunt’s tenure in September 2018.
These two new museum sites will be joined by a third in April 2026. Just down the road from the Storehouse will be its sister site, the V&A East Museum. First announced in 2018 with an initial proposed opening of 2023, the museum in Stratford will be squarely aimed at young people and the local communities of East London. It will display over 500 objects spanning art, architecture, design, performance, and fashion from the V&A’s national collections, in two, free permanent Why We Make galleries.
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Hunt has also programmed some of the UK's most popular and enduring exhibitions of the past decade. These include recent V&A exhibitions on Cartier and Coco Chanel’s legacy, as well as a display of Taylor Swift's costumes and awards, which drew huge crowds of younger audiences. This period has also seen the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history: a survey of fashion house Christian Dior which attracted almost 595,000 people in seven months in 2019.
Prior to his time in the museum world, Hunt served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017, where he was a vocal advocate for education and urban regeneration. He also served as Shadow Education Secretary from 2013 to 2015 under Ed Miliband’s leadership. He sensationally quit his seat under Jeremy Corbyn to take up the V&A Directorship, succeeding Martin Roth who led the museum from 2011 to 2016.
Hunt is also a distinguished historian, he was previously a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in Victorian urban history and political thought. His publications include the hugely acclaimed biography of Josiah Wedgwood titled The Radical Potter. It was long-listed for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History in 2022.
Earlier this month, Tristram Hunt told the New York Times that “there have been moments when the V&A was fusty and inward-looking” and that he has pursued “a high-low approach” to tackle this. “The goal is remaining scholarly, but not falling into scholasticism” he said.
In the same interview Hunt revealed the hardest part of his job was managing the volatile funding environment for museums. “The amount we get from the British government has fallen and fallen. I have to raise more and more money” he told the paper.
It's the second year in a row the King has knighted a Director of a national museum in Britain. Last year the National Gallery chief Gabriele Finaldi was made a Sir.
