Museums & Galleries

V&A East Storehouse

London, United Kingdom
V&A East Storehouse

London, United Kingdom

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A museum storehouse turned inside out. V&A East Storehouse is one of London’s most exciting new cultural spaces: part archive, part museum, part backstage pass into the hidden life of art and design.

Located at Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, V&A East Storehouse opened in May 2025 as a new way to experience the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections. Instead of hiding objects behind the scenes, it brings storage, conservation, research, and display into public view.

The space holds more than 250,000 objects and 350,000 books, opening up everything from furniture, fashion, sculpture, textiles, theatre design, pop culture, architecture, and design history to visitors in a raw, visible, warehouse-like environment.

Image credit

© V&A East Storehouse

What you’ll see here

This is not a traditional museum visit. It feels more like walking into the V&A’s brain: racks, shelves, crates, giant fragments, glass floors, visible storage, and objects that don’t always arrive with a neat museum label.

You may experience:

  • Open-access museum storage
  • Design, fashion, furniture, ceramics, textiles, sculpture, and performance objects
  • The David Bowie Centre, opened inside the Storehouse in 2025
  • The chance to use Order an Object, where visitors can book to view selected objects up close
  • A more democratic, behind-the-scenes approach to one of the world’s great design collections

General admission is free, and you do not need to book for a normal visit. The V&A’s visitor page notes that Order an Object appointments must be made online at least two weeks in advance.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you love design, archives, fashion, objects, or the hidden systems behind museums.

What makes V&A East Storehouse special is that it breaks the old museum rule: storage is no longer invisible. It turns the backstage into the experience and invites visitors to see culture as something collected, cared for, moved, classified, restored, questioned, and reactivated.

For Artlovers, this is worth the trip because it changes how you understand museums. You are not only seeing beautiful things — you are seeing how culture survives.

ArtLovers Tip

Don’t go looking for a perfect museum narrative. Go looking for surprise. The magic here is the mix: a chair, a theatre set, a textile, a fragment of architecture, a pop icon, a forgotten object — all sharing the same visual universe.

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London, United Kingdom

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