V&A East Storehouse

V&A East Storehouse is a publicly accessible storage facility and exhibition space for the Victoria and Albert Museum, located in the London Borough of Hackney within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Inaugurated in 2025, it represents a radical shift in museological practice by fusing conservation and storage with public exploration. Rather than presenting a curated narrative, the institution operates as a working warehouse where visitors can freely navigate over half a million objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives. As the first of two new V&A sites in the East Bank cultural quarter, it offers an unmediated encounter with the museum's reserve collections, allowing the public to witness conservation in action and request specific items for close-up viewing.

The impetus for the Storehouse arose from institutional necessity following the UK government's 2015 decision to sell Blythe House, the west London facility that had housed the majority of the V&A's stored collections since the mid-1980s. Faced with relocating roughly 600,000 objects, books, and archival collections, including larger items stored in Wiltshire, Deputy Director and COO Tim Reeve championed an ambitious vision to make the reserve collections publicly accessible. Developed over a decade with public input, including the V&A East Youth Collective, the project repurposed the media and broadcast center built for the 2012 London Olympics. The Storehouse officially opened on 31 May 2025, preceding the V&A East Museum, which is scheduled for 2026.

The holdings encompass the vast and eclectic reserve of the V&A, spanning multiple millennia and continents, ranging in scale from buttons and pins to entire architectural rooms. Objects are arranged by size and weight rather than historical style or strict categories, an approach the architects likened to a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. Displays are lightly curated to spark curiosity, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated items such as a Dutch giraffe piano, a Memphis Milano lamp, a Venetian bust, a Glastonbury Festival rubbish bin, Buddhist statues, and a model of the 2012 Olympic torch bowl. Many objects remain in their transport crates with protective braces left in place, emphasizing the working nature of the facility. Visitors can also access archival collections and National Art Library materials by appointment.

Six large-scale objects are integrated directly into the architecture. The 15th-century Torrijos ceiling, an Islamic and Christian wooden roof from a palace near Toledo acquired by the V&A in 1905 and dismantled in 1993, required three months of complex reassembly to fit its six-by-six meter space. A 12-tonne concrete facade section from the demolished brutalist Robin Hood Gardens estate commands the central stairwell. Other architectural inclusions are Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office and Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky's 1926 Frankfurt fitted kitchen. The David and Molly Lowell Borthwick Gallery houses monumental textiles, currently displaying Le Train Bleu, a 10-meter-high, 11-meter-wide Ballets Russes stage cloth by Pablo Picasso, regarded as his largest work. The David Bowie archive is anticipated to open later in 2025.

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Austin-Smith:Lord as executive architects, the 16,000-square-meter building occupies a section of the former Olympic media center at Here East. The architects retained the original industrial character and glazed facade, inserting two additional floors to maximize capacity. The design is organized from the inside out, centering on a galleried triple-height void hollowed from the building's core, the Weston Collections Hall, which rises over 20 meters. A massive stretched Barrisol ceiling simulates natural daylight. Public walkways with metal grid floors and glass balustrades allow views across the hall, while a section of glass flooring reveals the Agra Colonnade and working store below. Tributaries of visible storage extend toward the functional outer reaches, and a Conservation Overlook on level 3 provides views into the working labs.

Located on Parkes Street inside the Here East building, V&A East Storehouse offers free general admission without advance booking. The facility is open daily from 10am to 6pm, with extended hours until 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays. Access is step-free, with lifts connecting all levels. Because it is a working storehouse, bags and coats must be stowed in free lockers in the Welcome Space, and practical flat footwear is recommended due to the metal grid flooring. Visitors can use the Order an Object service to book free, close-up appointments with specific items, including a 1954 Cristobal Balenciaga pink silk taffeta evening dress that has proven exceptionally popular. The closest rail link is Hackney Wick Overground station, an eight-minute walk away, with Stratford station a twenty-minute walk. The 388 bus route and the Here East shuttle from Stratford provide additional transport links.