It looks like the Hangar 51 store room from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark: row after row of boxes and artefacts kept in climate-controlled conditions. The V&A East Storehouse is not off limits, though. The team behind it hope 250,000 people a year will visit and gain access to archives such as its recently acquired David Bowie collection.
Delayed because of the pandemic, the storehouse, one of two new locations for the museum, will open to the public on 31 May next year in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The huge space spans four floors and is the size of 30 basketball courts, encompassing 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and nearly 1,000 archives.
Tim Reeve, the deputy director of the V&A, said the storehouse, designed by the New York-based architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is “fundamentally different to the way any museum has thought about its non-display collections”.
“It’s our working building, our collections hub, our Amazon warehouse for the V&A collection. It’s also completely free to enter a self-guided cultural experience, so it’s got to be both those things,” he said.
“As a visitor you can walk in off the street, no need to book, and wander around what would usually be the preserve of V&A technicians, curators and conservators. It’s bringing to the public the bit you don’t usually get to see, the bit below the waterline.”
Amid vast rows of furniture and other artefacts, there is also Antonio Canova’s marble sculpture Sleeping Nymph; the Clothworkers’ Centre for textiles and fashion; and the Torrijos ceiling from the Altamira Palace in Spain.
Reeve hopes the new space, which replaces Blythe House, in west London, a site that attracted about 5,000 visitors a year who had to pre-book, will attract a quarter of a million people in its first year.
The building is owned by the Delancey Group, which leases it to the V&A on a long-term basis, with a grant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport funding the £50m move from Blythe House.
The space itself is also an attraction: there will be 100 “mini curated displays”, including items from the collections of the fashion designer Imane Ayissi and artist Xanthe Somers.
One of the main draws will be the David Bowie collection, which was acquired after the successful 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is, which set new records at the time as the fastest selling event in the institution’s history.
Reeve said: “It’s going to be called the David Bowie Centre, it will have a different design treatment to maybe some of the other archives but it’s there for researchers and the creation of new knowledge about one of the greatest Brits of all time.”
The new site will operate a system called “order an object”, where almost any item from the collection can be brought out of storage to be examined, with Reeve promising it will be operated fairly. “If you’re working on a GCSE artwork, that’s just as valid in our view to somebody who is coming in and researching a new catalogue or designing a new collection,” he said.
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said V&A East Storehouse would be a “wonderful addition to our capital’s cultural landscape”.
Chris Bryant, the arts minister, said improving access to the UK’s cultural assets for people from all backgrounds was “very important to this government”.
“With more of our national collections on display, its unique and personalised experience will allow more people to better understand the rich heritage of our country,” he added.
