Museums are funny things. You shuffle quietly from room to room, hands respectfully in pockets, craning your neck to squint at artefacts safely sequestered behind glass, trying your best not to knock anything over. The V&A Storehouse, though, wants you to behave quite differently.
Opened in London’s Olympic Park, the V&A Storehouse takes the museum experience, turns it inside out, and then politely hands it to you. Rather than tiptoeing around priceless objects, you are invited to get closer... much closer. The Storehouse allows visitors not just to view but handle pieces from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s immense collection. Five-thousand years of human creativity at your fingertips.
The numbers are staggering. Over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, 1,000 archives, all housed in a 170,000-square-foot facility designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the architects behind New York’s High Line. The space is vast, industrial, and refreshingly unprecious. Forklifts beep in the background; visitors chatter, compare notes. There is a dress designed by Balenciaga, a jacket worn by Elton John, a curtain dreamed up by Picasso – not cordoned off, but accessible, almost familiar.
V&A Storehouse: Up close and personal
The most remarkable feature is the ‘Order an Object’ service. Book an appointment and you can sit down with a Bob Mackie military tunic, a Vivienne Westwood sweater, or a 17th-century Mughal colonnade. Victorian wallpaper that might poison you? Off limits, understandably. But most objects are fair game, with staff on hand to guide the experience.
Beyond the novelty, the Storehouse is part of a wider shift. Museums are under pressure to open their archives, to be more transparent about how – and from where – collections were assembled. Here, the process is laid bare. Conservators can be watched at work. Labels aren’t just about provenance but about process.
This isn’t the hushed, reverent museum experience of old. It’s a living archive, designed to spark conversation rather than stifle it. And if you want to inspect the stitch work on a Balenciaga gown or admire the threads of a 19th-century kimono up close, nobody is going to tell you not to touch.
Next up: The OPUMO 24-hour London itinerary.
