Experience 5,000 Years of Art at London’s V&A Storehouse Museum: A Hands-On Journey

LONDON – A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight.

Typically, large collections showcase only a small portion of their items, with the majority kept in storage. This isn’t the case at the new V&A East Storehouse, where the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has made its storage areas accessible to visitors, allowing them to see and, often, touch the items housed there.

The facility, spanning 16,000 square meters (170,000 square feet) – equivalent to more than 30 basketball courts – contains over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives. Exploring its vast, three-story collections hall offers an experience akin to strolling through IKEA but with remarkable treasures at every corner.

As the national museum of design, performance, and applied arts in Britain, the V&A features an array of open shelves stocked with an eclectic mix of items. Visitors can find everything from ancient Egyptian footwear to Roman ceramics, Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist pieces of furniture, a Piaggio scooter, and even a vibrant trash can from the Glastonbury Festival.

“It’s 5,000 years of creativity,” said Kate Parsons, the museum’s director of collection care and access. It took more than a year, and 379 truckloads, to move the objects from the museum’s former storage facility in west London to the new site.

Get up close to objects

In the museum’s biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese netsuke figurine. Most of the items can even be handled, with exceptions for hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpaper that contains arsenic.

The Order an Object service offers “a behind-the-scenes, very personal, close interaction” with the collection, Parsons said as she showed off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. Nearby in one of the study rooms were a Bob Mackie-designed military tunic worn by Elton John on his 1981 world tour and two silk kimonos laid out ready for a visit.

Parsons said there has been “a phenomenal response” from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and “someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.” She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations.

“It’s just wonderful,” Parsons said. “You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn’t know.”

A new cultural district

The V&A’s flagship museum in London’s affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain’s biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games.

As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London’s most deprived districts.

Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York’s High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some 10 meters (more than 30 feet) high.

Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate.

Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center, a home for the late London-born musician’s archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September.

Museums seek transparency

One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum’s inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators’ job – from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work.

The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire

Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, “so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A’s collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects.

“On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,” she said. “What we’re doing here is saying, ‘No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.’ That is our fundamental principle.”