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Daily 10am-5.45pm (Wed also 6.30-9.30pm); GBP5; free after 4.30pm; www.vam.ac.uk. Tube: South Kensington. In terms of sheer variety and scale, the Victoria and Albert Museum (popularly known as the V&A), on Cromwell Road, is the greatest museum of applied arts in the world. The range of exhibits on display here means that, whatever your taste, there is almost bound to be something to grab your attention. The most celebrated of the V&A's numerous exhibits are the Raphael Cartoons , seven vast biblical paintings that served as designs for a set of tapestries destined for the Sistine Chapel. Close by, you can view highlights from the country's largest dress collection, and the world's largest collection of Indian art outside India. In addition, there are galleries devoted to Chinese, Islamic, Japanese and Korean art, as well as costume jewellery, glassware, metalwork and photography. Wading through the huge collection of European sculpture, you come to the surreal Plaster Casts gallery, filled with copies of European art's greatest hits, from Michelangelo's David to Trajan's Column (sawn in half to make it fit). There's even a gallery of twentieth-century objets d'art - everything from Bauhaus furniture to Swatch watches - to rival that of the Design Museum. Over in the Henry Cole Wing , meanwhile, you'll find an entire office interior by Frank Lloyd Wright, a collection of sixteenth-century portrait miniatures, more Constable paintings than the Tate, and a goodly collection of sculptures by Rodin. As if all this were not enough, the V&A's temporary shows are among the best in Britain, ranging over vast areas of art, craft and technology. Beautifully but haphazardly displayed across a seven-mile, four-storey maze of halls and corridors, the V&A's treasures are impossible to survey in a single visit. Floor plans from the information desks can help you decide on which areas to concentrate. If you're flagging, there's Millburns restaurant in the basement of the Henry Cole Wing, or a more edifying cafe in the museum's period-piece Poynter, Morris and Gamble refreshment rooms. Like all London's major museums, the V&A has big plans for the future, with a GBP75 million multifaceted extension, known as the " Spiral " and designed by controversial Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind, due to open in 2004.
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