Touch Roman pottery and Elton John’s tunic at London museum site that’s like an Ikea store

A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Only a fraction of their items are on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view – and in many cases touch – the items within. The 16,000 square metre (170,000 sq ft) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-storey collections hall feels like a trip to Ikea, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain’s national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armour, modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted dustbin from the Glastonbury Festival. “It’s 5,000 years of creativity,” says 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. In the museum’s biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair jumper 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 says as she shows off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. What we’re doing here is saying, ‘No, this whole collection belongs to all of us [ …] That is our fundamental principle V&A East Storehouse senior curator Georgia Haseldine 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 says 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 says. “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.” The V&A’s flagship museum, founded in the 1850s in London’s affluent South Kensington district, is one of Britain’s biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a post-industrial swathe 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 theatre and another V&A branch, set 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 metres 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 facade 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 Centre, a home for the late London-born musician’s archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is planned to open at the Storehouse in September. 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 UK 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. V&A East Storehouse senior curator Georgia Haseldine says 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 per cent of their collections on show,” she says. “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.”

Touch Roman pottery and Elton John’s tunic at London museum site that’s like an Ikea store

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From ancient Egyptian shoes to a curtain Picasso designed, London’s V&A East Storehouse offers ‘close interactions’ with 250,000 objects

From ancient Egyptian shoes to a curtain Picasso designed, London’s V&A East Storehouse offers ‘close interactions’ with 250,000 objects