Following a record-breaking year, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) has been named Museum of the Year 2016, with judges saying it had “indisputably become one of the best museums in the world”.

Announced by the Duchess of Cambridge at a ceremony held in the Natural History Museum, the £100,000 (US$130,000, €118,000) Art Fund prize is the largest museum prize in the world and the largest single arts prize in the UK.

The V&A beat out competition from a shortlist of five museums, also including Arnolfini (Bristol), Bethlem Museum of the Mind (London), Jupiter Artland (West Lothian), and York Art Gallery (Yorkshire).

2015 has been a landmark year for the V&A, which attracted nearly 3.9 million visitors, while also receiving 14.5 million visitors online and recording membership numbers of 90,000. The museum’s largest success came in March, when debuted its exhibition programme Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which attracted 493,043 people to the visitor attraction during its 21-week run – an attendance record.

“The V&A is thriving as a world-class museum and centre of excellence for research and expertise,” said Martin Roth, director of the V&A. “This award not only allows us to celebrate our achievements over the past year, but it will progress our ambitions to continue to transform our building and make our unparalleled collections of art and design accessible to the widest possible audiences in the UK and overseas.”

Roth then revealed that the prize money would be used to support smaller museums across the country, reestablishing a department axed due to budget cuts to share the V&A’s work with regional museums.

“With this prize we plan to revive the Museum’s legendary Circulation department, which collected and shared the best of contemporary design with regional museums, galleries and art colleges, but which closed in 1976,” said Roth.

“We will ‘recirculate’ our collections, taking them beyond our usual metropolitan partners and engaging in a more intimate way with the communities we reach so that we can continue to deliver on our ambition to be both a national museum for a local audience and a local museum for a national audience.”

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