Art to order? How the V&A East Storehouse is building a new future for museums

It looks like the warehouse section of a large Ikea store — in a glossier guise. Rows of industrial-chic shelving hold packaged objects of every shape and size, and at the end of each rack are curated mini-displays, which could include anything from an art deco chest of drawers to a Victorian crinoline petticoat, an Iznik ceramic plate made in Turkey in 1590 or a pair of trainers from 1994. These are all housed in ascending tiers of glassed walkways where the public can wander at will, around a central space that acts as a viewing platform. Here a glass floor gives glimpses below into more storage space: an array of historic tiles, part of the colonnade from the Red Fort at Agra, the sense of other cavernous spaces to explore and more treasures to find.

At a time when museums across the western world face falling revenue, a crisis in philanthropy and relentless criticism, the V&A East Storehouse suggests a new approach. This extension of the venerable London museum is due to open in May, purpose-designed by architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro in a section of the former London 2012 Olympics Media Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, an expanding cultural hub. It will have a sister museum, V&A East, added in 2026 to the expanding museum family, which also numbers Young V&A (the former Museum of Childhood).

At the opposite side of the capital from its mother ship in South Kensington, there’s a new audience to consider, and V&A’s Storehouse has a radical vision. Whether you call it working storage, open-access warehousing or redesigned display, according to Tim Reeve, deputy director and chief operating officer of the V&A, it “sets a new paradigm for access to national collections”. The idea is a simple one: to make the greatest possible number of the museum’s 2.8mn objects available for the public to savour. If you can’t see it or find it, you can use the “Order an Object” service, and have something brought to you and explained by a willing curator.

This model seems like a win-win. It answers the call for greater democratisation of the museum-going experience, a rethink of the relationship between objects on display and objects in storage, and a self-guided experience that involves a different attitude to curation. At the same time it utilises the reality of museum storage — until now a more or less dead space in terms of the public, yet a huge drain on precious resources.

For the V&A with its limitlessly wide remit, the storage question is pressing. Founded in 1852, the museum is effectively devoted to hoarding, gathering every snippet of as many art and craft forms as you could name, as well as a vast collection of books, papers and photographs. The contents of the new storehouse range from the pins used to secure a 17th-century ruff to a 1926 Ballets Russes theatre backcloth more than 10 metres wide, from an entire office designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937 to Vivienne Westwood’s 1990s rubberised cotton raincoat or a selection of delicate Japanese dolls more than a century old. A tsunami of stuff.

The V&A’s Storehouse idea is not unique. While a number of museums now offer access to their stores on an occasional basis, the spanking new Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, located next to the eponymous museum, can claim to be the first purpose-built publicly accessible art storage unit. With 154,000 pieces of art that can be pulled out of sliding storage racks by visitors, it’s also a mecca for anyone curious about the backstage workings of a museum collection: the Depot is a functioning workplace and on open view are restoration and other behind-the-scenes activities.

Another storage facility that opened to the general public in 2024 — with strangely little fanfare — is the British Museum’s BM_ARC, located in Berkshire, west of London, and run in conjunction with the University of Reading. Designed by the British practice John McAslan + Partners, it is a research hub as well as a display space (the ARC of the title stands for Archaeological Research Collection) and its 15,600 sq metres house some 1.3mn artefacts, dating from 5,000 BCE to the present day — every one of them with a full digital record.

There is room for very large exhibits, including ancient sculptures, mosaics and historic casts. Delving into the smaller contents is like coming across a fantasy shopping list: from clay pipes to Peruvian embroidery and (among the best) 5,000-year-old fingerprints preserved on antler picks.

These three institutions all have their own views of their practice. The Depot declares that it is in fact “not a museum”; the British Museum, with its university partnership, claims “a radically different approach to museum storage by also facilitating research and study”. And the V&A sees itself as “breaking down physical barriers to get visitors closer than ever before to their national collections”.

These statements, optimistic as they are, all signal a sector that is feeling its way through what Maria Balshaw, director of Tate, calls the “contradictions that haunt the public museum”, the opposition between “the challenges of the past and the ambitions of the present”. Those present ambitions are clear, if difficult to achieve: to satisfy contemporary notions of equity and ethics, of diversity and inclusivity, of ecological responsibility, even if that means challenging many of the concepts on which the older institutions were founded — including the now controversial ideas of excellence and cultural dominance.

In her recent book Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, Balshaw evokes the concept of “degrowth” in relation to museums. For much of the past half-century, which saw rampant building of galleries and museums, expansionism has ruled: indeed, Tate led the way with its outposts across Britain. That thinking is rapidly being revised in the current funding and ethical climate and with the lessons learnt — about what audiences really want — during the pandemic closures.

And although it might seem contradictory to evoke degrowth when discussing gleaming new buildings such as these three, the open-storage model — in effect, revisiting and making use of what you already have — stands in stark contrast to the other prevailing museum trend of the past half-century: the blockbuster show.

These big-ticket events, large loan exhibitions of (usually dead, white, male) famous names, have been extraordinarily successful as the third leg of the tripod on which almost all European museums rest: public funds, philanthropy and earned income. But the blockbuster is an increasingly problematic concept. Despite its earning potential, the costs are horribly high, not only operationally and financially but in environmental terms, when factors such as packing and shipping come into the equation. And then there is their reliance on the now elephant-trapped area of commercial sponsorship.

The blockbuster can fall short in cultural terms, too. Although for many it’s a joy to see a huge exhibition of Bacon or Van Gogh, these might hold less attraction for a younger audience, who could be the museum-goers of the future if only the institutions can prove enticing enough. At V&A’s Storehouse, a bevy of young curators are addressing this, through education programmes and activities, as well as at the David Bowie Centre that will house the musician’s collection of memorabilia — and opens as part of the Storehouse in September.

In that way, the degrowth concept, which emphasises values other than the purely financial and encourages the assessment of human and social needs, holds another strand of wisdom for museums. It would be foolish ever to overlook the urgent need for funding, but it’s also essential to keep in mind the wider issues involved in the very existence of a museum today. Years ago, museums were places where we went to look at things in glass cases, and that was that. Now, the burden is vastly greater: our museums are expected to provide excitement, experience, education, community awareness and a civic space, social cohesion. They are charged with addressing difficult and powerful questions reaching far beyond the art and objects in their care. Like secular temples, they are supposed to stand as beacons of moral probity, and provide moral leadership. (What else could explain the rage with which protesters attack our cultural institutions?)

Huge questions continue to resonate. Where, for example, do the “older pleasures of contemplation meet those of participation”, asks Sam Thorne, former director of Tate St Ives. The curator Rachel Noël has suggested that museums could “function as our homes, our corner shops, our schools, our dancefloors and our temples”; American activist-artist Theaster Gates believes that “all one has to do is build the space you want to rock in”. As guidance, that might all sound a little vague, but these three open-storage institutions are certainly trying to find a new way.

The V&A East Storehouse, London, opens on May 31, vam.ac.uk

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