Tim Reeve, the deputy director of London’s world-famous V&A applied arts institution, says that most of the world’s biggest museums only have space to display about 3% of their collections. The other 97% languishes in warehouses, waiting to be chosen for display or examined by scholars.
This year, the V&A—which was established in 1852 during the reign of Queen Victoria and has only been expanding its holdings since then—endeavors to make some of those hidden items accessible again.
On May 31, the V&A opens a brand-new visitor attraction, the V&A East Storehouse, in East London, where some 250,000 fine art objects (including books, furniture, clothing, paintings, and much more), 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives have been moved and catalogued in a delirious open-air jumble of beautiful artifacts from history.
During the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, this 172,223-square-foot (16,000 square meters) facility operated as the International Broadcast Centre in what is now called Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. When visitors first enter the vast building today, they might feel as if they’ve stumbled into the real-life location for the final shot of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Rarities of every conceivable type and origin are stacked on raw wooden palettes on multiple ascending levels, repeating in rows into your deep perspective. The climate-controlled air smells of old wood and antiquity. It seems like the perfect place to lose a priceless artifact to the hungry maw of bureaucracy.
The museum where you can touch items
But at the V&A East Storehouse, every item is thoughtfully catalogued and labeled, and anyone who comes to visit can learn about everything that’s here.
Visitors can even arrange to inspect most of the objects by hand through the Storehouse’s unique Order an Object program. In advance of a visit, anyone—and that means you—can select up to five items marked as available for inspection on the collection pages of the V&A website.
Then choose the date and time you want to come, and on the day of your visit, curators will be on hand to show you what you’ve requested, teach you how to handle the items correctly, and tell you about them.
Students of fashion are already diving into the new opportunity to examine artifacts that previously had to lie dormant in locked warehouses. As of late May 2025, the two most requested items are a dress by Balenciaga and a Christian Dior New Look garment from the mid-20th century. One woman used the system to research her own wedding dress by studying designs from the distant past.
“We are able to provide meaningful democratized access to a world previously thought to be the exclusive preserve of the established creative researcher,” Reeve said in opening remarks on Wednesday, calling the new museum “a book that is open and never shut, and a schoolroom for everyone.”
Best of all, the facility is free to visit, just like the main V&A museum. In London, tax-supported cultural institutions are intentionally made accessible to everyone—a civilized custom that goes back a long way.
If you can’t arrange to handle your preferred objects ahead of time, curators still intend to show visitors the best of the selections. Each day, staffers will set up multiple viewing times for different objects—often, ones that other guests have requested for their own private Order an Object sessions. Those viewings will be announced on the “Today at Storehouse” board posted to the right as visitors enter.
At the main V&A, the greatest hits remain center stage most of the time. But here, curators have set aside about 100 display cases for specially chosen objects, and these highlights will constantly be changing. Temporary callouts are accompanied by QR codes that, when scanned, lead to more information from the V&A’s curators.
A few enormous items, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1937 interior for Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh and the spectacular carved pine Torrijos ceiling from medieval Islamic Spain (about 1490) receive their own full displays.
Find out about anything on display
Visitors can use the information beside every object on view to search the V&A’s Collections database to discover the backstory. (There’s free Wi-Fi onsite for that purpose.)
For example, using the inventory code printed above the accompanying bar code strip, you’ll learn that the bust pictured below is that of King Philip IV of Spain, and it was made in the early 1700s in Italy. The catalog page even tells you when and how the museum acquired the artifact—this one was purchased more than 60 years ago.
There’s a lot more—architectural models, vases, ancient carvings, wallpaper designed by entertainer Justin Vivian Bond, a rare silk scarf worn by a British suffragette, and many things that could never be predicted. Nothing is grouped in obvious sections. Items of different eras, materials, origins, and intentions rest cheek by jowl so that visitors can make their own connections between them.
There are other London museums that take a hodgepodge approach—Sir John Soane’s collection, which remains just as messy as it was when it was assembled two centuries ago, was a milestone for exhibitions—but none of them take the concept to the Storehouse’s maximalist, smartphone-ready extreme.
“We decided to lean into the delirium,” explains Elizabeth Diller, a lead partner with the Storehouse’s architecture firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “The collection is unusually eclectic, but also vast. It’s a collection of collections.”
V&A East Storehouse is the first of three major expansions by the V&A. On September 15, within the Storehouse, 90,000 objects from the collection left by superstar David Bowie will open as its own attraction, the David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts.
And in 2026, V&A East, which will have a particular focus on the history and culture of East London, will open in the same complex, Here East.
V&A East Storehouse’s address is 2 Parkes St., Stratford Cross, London E20 (020/7942-2000). The nearest train stop is Hackney Wick on the Midmay line of the Overground; fares can be paid using the same payment system as the Tube and bus system.
The Storehouse is open 10am–6pm daily, and until 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays. To participate in the Order an Object program, you must place your order at least 2 weeks ahead of your visit at www.vam.ac.uk/info/order-an-object.
