Tim Reeve, the deputy director and chief operating officer of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, likens the long-awaited V&A East Storehouse—a vast new open-access working store due to open 31 May—to a retail experience.
“If you think of V&A East Storehouse as a working museum building—a logistics centre for our collections and archives—and, uniquely, also a large-scale self-guided cultural experience, then you could say it shares some of the characteristics and browsability of the Ikea shopping experience,” he says. The aim of the project is to break down physical barriers and remove glass cases so visitors can get closer than ever before to their national collections.
Based at the 2012 Olympics site in Stratford, east London, the depot holds more than 250,000 objects and 1,000 archives (the V&A collection includes around 2.8 million objects in total). Spanning four levels and 16,000 sq. m, the new space, housed in part of the former Olympics Media Centre, is designed by the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It will be admission-free and open daily.
A site visit reveals the space’s operations will be underpinned by a flexible “kit of parts” that enables objects to come on and off display more easily. The V&A says visitors will be able to access all objects via an Order an Object service.
Reeve says the architectural brief was to design the “public network”, and the positioning of objects around visitors’ self-guided routes, to be as flexible and responsive as possible, reflecting the fact that items will be constantly moved around. “In that sense, everything on the public network at V&A East Storehouse should be read as provision, as a work in progress,” he adds.
Order an object
This may require a new mindset from a public used to seeing objects presented on plinths rather than pallets. “Order an Object is a new service for a museum, and, as with any innovation, we can’t be certain that we’ll get it right first time. My biggest fear is that we may not be able to meet demand!” Reeve says.
Order an Object appointment at V&A East Storehouse
Photo by Bet Bettencourt
The seven-day-a-week service will have a new online booking system. “It will not be so different from booking a table at a restaurant, cinema tickets or a squash court, allowing anyone to book up to five objects relating to whatever creative pursuit they’re working on two weeks ahead of time,” Reeve says.
Other institutions that have embraced open access storage include the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which launched its Depot space in 2021, claiming “you can see the entire collection [154,000 works]” in it.
Reeve cites other museum storage centres around the world which promise visible or accessible storage, typically for booked research visits and educational groups. They include the Luce Centers in the US at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. “But these are experiences moderated by glass, and often with limited and complicated access,” he adds.
The V&A’s new facility will fuel debate about how and why museums continue to collect—with some directors advocating “degrowth”, questioning whether collection enlargement is sustainable in the long term. The British Museum owns at least eight million objects, with roughly 80,000 of them on public display at the Bloomsbury institution at any one time—1% of the collection. At London’s National Gallery, around 38% of the 2,600-work collection will be on display following an extensive bicentenary rehang this month.
Size and success
The Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, considers how and why museums should be expanding in her recent book, Gathering of Strangers. “The power and influence of a museum is not dictated by size,” she writes. “What I want to do is challenge the assumption that the measure of a museum’s success is when it doubles in size or opens a new outpost.”
Whether V&A East Storehouse is the way forward in terms of collection management will be tested over time, but Reeve acknowledges that storage and display space “is finite and increasingly expensive”. This challenge should be met by finding new ways in which non-display collections can be more equitably accessed, he argues.
Meanwhile the nearby V&A East Museum is due to open in spring 2026, with both projects working together as two cultural destinations connected by the theme of “making”, Reeve says.
Together, the twin projects represent the largest UK museum development scheme for decades. Total costs are expected to exceed those of the British Museum’s £100m Great Court project, which opened in 2000. Reeve does not confirm the total cost for the V&A East Storehouse but says the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport is the principal funder, with a £50m grant. Additional support came from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Foyle Foundation and the French tech entrepreneur Frédéric Jousset.
V&A East Storehouse has been set a visitor target, although the figure remains confidential. “It’s very difficult to know what the demand will be for an experience that doesn’t really have a comparator, and in any case visitor numbers aren’t the only measure of success,” Reeve says. But for V&A East Storehouse to be successful, it needs to be well used by east Londoners, he stresses. “One day, I would like to see a future director of V&A East inspired to enter the world of museums through a visit to V&A East Storehouse.”
A 15th-century palace ceiling is one of six built-in objects at the depot
© V&A
Six of the biggest Displays
Built into the structure of the V&A East Storehouse will be six large-scale dramatic objects, some of which have not been displayed for decades. They include the Agra Colonnade from India (1637), a Frankfurt Kitchen by the Austrian designer Margarete Schütte-
Lihotzky (1926), a section of the exterior façade of the demolished Robin Hood Gardens council estate in east London (1972), and a Ballets Russes theatre stage cloth (1924).
Another large object is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kauf-mann office (1937), originally installed in a Pittsburgh department store. “The office comprises more than 240 pieces of plywood, which tends to delaminate over time, and so the focus of practical conservation work was on the consolidation of the delicate layers of wood veneer,” says Holly Harris, senior project manager at the V&A East Storehouse.
The final large object is a 15th-century marquetry Torrijos ceiling from the now destroyed Altamira Palace near Toledo, Spain.
- V&A East Storehouse opens on 31 May
