When the Galleries Get Too Hot: Why V&A Staff Are Balloting to Strike

There is a version of the museum visit that most of us carry around in our heads. Cool, hushed rooms. Soft light on old objects. A sense that the temperature, like the silence, has been carefully arranged for our benefit. The reality behind the galleries is rather different, and this summer it has become the subject of a formal dispute at one of Britain’s best-loved institutions.

On 23 July, the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) opened a strike ballot covering more than 300 staff across the Victoria and Albert Museum’s four London sites: the original South Kensington building, the new V&A East Museum and Storehouse, and the Young V&A in Bethnal Green. The ballot closes at noon on 20 August. If members vote yes, one of the country’s flagship museums could face industrial action in the autumn.

What the dispute is actually about

The headlines have fixed on heat, and with reason. The union is asking for a policy that would close galleries when internal temperatures reach 30°C, along with better heat-mitigation for staff who work behind the scenes in spaces that visitors never see. One of the more startling claims is about drinking water: PCS says management has been reluctant to let some staff carry or drink water while on duty, a detail that has done the museum no favours in the press.

But heat is only the most visible part of a broader argument about pay and conditions. The union is seeking a minimum pay rise of around four per cent, time-and-a-half for bank holiday working, and for the V&A to become an accredited Real Living Wage employer. The museum, for its part, points to a package it says includes an above-inflation award, a 3.6 per cent increase to the overall pay bill and a 6.9 per cent rise for its lowest-paid workers. It also states that all staff are paid at least the London Living Wage of £14.80 an hour, and that during the peak of the recent heatwave it introduced extra rest breaks, increased rotations, closed several South Kensington galleries and shut the Young V&A for eleven days.

Both sets of numbers can be true at once. That is usually how these disputes work. The gap is less about a single figure than about what counts as a fair floor, and about who absorbs the discomfort when a Victorian building meets a twenty-first-century summer.

A building that was never designed for this

The South Kensington site is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century museum architecture, and nineteenth-century architecture did not anticipate the kind of sustained heat the UK has seen in recent summers. Naturally lit galleries and grand top-lit courts are wonderful for looking at objects and punishing to sit in for eight hours when the mercury climbs. Retrofitting climate control into a listed building is slow, expensive and often architecturally constrained.

This is not a V&A problem alone. It is a sector problem, and an object-conservation problem as much as a staffing one. The same heat that makes a warder’s shift miserable also threatens light-sensitive works on paper, textiles and lacquer. Museums increasingly find that the interests of their collections, their staff and their visitors all point in the same direction: cooler, more stable, more carefully managed spaces. Getting there costs money that public institutions, squeezed for over a decade, do not obviously have.

Why it matters beyond South Kensington

For anyone who cares about galleries, the V&A ballot is worth watching for what it says about the wider ecosystem. The people who keep public collections open, safe and legible are not incidental to the experience; they are the experience. Gallery attendants, front-of-house teams, technicians and conservators are the reason you can walk in off the Cromwell Road and stand in front of the Ardabil Carpet. When their working conditions become untenable, access is what suffers first, through reduced hours, closed rooms and, potentially, strike days.

It also lands at a moment of real change for the museum. The V&A has just opened its ambitious East sites, expanding its footprint and its workforce at exactly the point when the terms of that work are in question. The Prospect union has run its own parallel ballot, and the guards’ union UVW has been in dispute with South Kensington museums over pay and dismissals earlier in the year. Whatever the outcome, the V&A is now a test case for how British museums reconcile expansion, climate pressure and a labour force that is no longer willing to treat sweltering back rooms as simply part of the job.

What to watch next

The result of the PCS ballot will not be known until late August, and a yes vote does not automatically mean walkouts; it gives the union a mandate to negotiate from a stronger position. The likeliest outcome is a settlement that nudges pay and formalises a hot-weather policy. But the underlying question will not go away. As long as the summers keep getting hotter, every institution housed in a beautiful old building will have to decide who pays for keeping it cool.