V&A East Storehouse

The V&A East Storehouse is a wonderful, beautiful and quite awesome experience.

I've been fortunate enough to be inside quite a few archives where the bones of gallery and museum collections lie: the real stuff of artefacts before they get polished up and shown in a glass cabinet, accompanied by explaining text and context. I visited the old V&A archive in Blythe House which was splendid: a vast place filled with wooden cabinets, almost like a beautiful dream where you get to wonder through a treasure trove. Other archives I've visited have often been less salubrious: perhaps somewhere cramped but intriguing where the atmospheric conditions are ideal for objects but not humans.

And so I had hopes and fears as I went to V&A's new Storehouse in East London. But you walk in and there it all is, vastness again, and rows and levels of objects, artefacts, wonders and treasures, all there to be encountered without the layers of curation that museums offer and impose.

Curation is important, a vital language which helps each generation to interpret its past. Without curation and knowledge, we often lose the significance of items, our very living history in fact.

And yet how pleasurable it is to have encounters with objects, with many, many objects, totally unencumbered by those layers of curation. There are no, or few, labels and explanations drawing the eye away from the object itself. That experience simply engages the imagination, and triggers all the accumulated knowledge drawn from previous museum visits and other learning.

The artefacts are arranged seemingly randomly. Of course, they're not completely random - some are grouped and clustered, but there is a feel that everything is placed and arranged primarily by size and more practical reasoning than relationships. We're so used to artefacts being presented to us to illustrate their relationship to a time or cultural movement within museums and galleries that Storehouse seems utterly fresh.

Perhaps it's like being in a warehouse for a large auction house. There are treasures and discoveries to be made around every corner. The arrangements can and will shift over time as the objects are needed, for this is a working archive. We can watch the conservation studios through glass ceilings. We are aware of even more rows of stored works which are not yet available. It keeps opening up.

I can't even describe what I saw there - what do you see in museums? No spoilers - discover for yourself! V&A have raised the game and rewritten what an archive can be. All of these artefacts belong to the public, and now we can access them. We are personally culturally the richer. This won't replace museums, but will enhance museums visits with the focus on the object and not the curation in mind.

I recently went along to the Museum and Heritage show - a trade show for the sector. That's a whole other story which I may well tell. I would say the trend there was towards digital displays and the creep of AI. In that ethical minefield, the V&A have reframed the museum experience. State of the art is for the technology which has allowed this warehouse encounter, and I thank whatever deity that they did not invest in something like holographic experience of objects. Come along and feel the presence of objects and smell the aroma of history which hangs in the air.

Opening 31 May 2025. Free.

V&A East Storehouse Parkes Street, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick, London E20 3AX

Find out more and all the impressive stats:

vam.ac.uk/east 

Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park area is a great area to explore and have a mooch about.