The centre is the new home of the David Bowie Archive, an extraordinary collection of 90,000+ items tracing Bowie’s creative life and process: costumes, photographs, handwritten lyrics, instruments, notebooks, stage designs, props, fan material, and unrealised projects.

This is not just memorabilia. It is a map of how an artist builds worlds. Bowie appears here as musician, performer, image-maker, actor, reader, collector, collaborator, and cultural shapeshifter. The archive reveals the machinery behind the myth: sketches, drafts, personas, costumes, references, experiments, failures, and transformations.

Because Bowie understood something very contemporary before almost anyone else: identity is not fixed — it can be designed, performed, questioned, broken, and rebuilt.

For Artlovers, this is worth the trip because it connects art, fashion, music, performance, gender, visual culture, and self-invention in one place. It also sits inside V&A East Storehouse, a radical museum model where storage becomes public and visitors can get closer to objects usually hidden from view.

Don’t go only as a fan. Go as if you were studying a creative mind.

Look at the costumes, yes — but also at the drafts, notes, references and unfinished ideas. The most powerful part may be seeing how much work, research and experimentation sat behind the image of effortless cool.

Bowie did not just “change style.” He built identities as artworks.