V&A East to open its warehouse to the public next year

The V&A has announced that its new east London warehouse housing over 600,000 objects will open to the public next year for free tours and exhibitions.

The warehouse building on the edge of Olympic Park will house the V&A’s huge archive, provide facilities for researchers and conservators, and host a range of exhibitions. Later, it will also house the David Bowie archive, which will be open for schools to visit.

The building, formerly the London 2012 media centre and now Here East, is quite a functional space, as befits its warehouse function. However, there’s also a corridor passing through that will be open to the public, which leads to a large open space in the heart of the archive with three floors of warehousing to explore.

There is also a glass floor to walk over so you can see down to the ground floor and the tops of large objects, which are usually only seen from the floor looking up.

Apart from visiting to look at the warehouse building, researchers will also be able to request objects from the archive to be brought to them for study, hopefully opening up more of the archive to the public.

The V&A has been relatively quiet about this project, which was initiated in 2017 when they signed a 100-year lease on the new building. Since then, they’ve moved their archive from Blythe House in West Kensington and are now in the final stages of preparing the new building for the public.

The V&A East Storehouse will open on 31 May 2025. It will be followed by the David Bowie Centre in September 2025 and the V&A East Museum in Spring 2026.