A lot has happened since the close of the 2012 London Olympics: Britain extracting itself from the European project, a devastating global pandemic, and the concurrent crescendos of global authoritarianism and climate breakdown have pulled the attention economy in every direction over the last decade. All that time, however, what was the Olympic site of stadia and infrastructure for millions of temporary spectators has slowly transformed and melted back into the city.

The much-vaunted “Olympic Legacy” has many rightful critics. The jury as to whether spending £8 billion on a two week sporting competition as a form of developer-led boosterism was a great long-term strategy is arguably still out. Even the parklands that encapsulated the main Olympic site, now renamed Queen Elizabeth II Park and branded “No Ordinary Park”, raise many voices of critique, even as it slowly matures and develops its own personality. Before the transformation led by AECOM & LDA landscape architects, the area may not have been picturesque or postcard-ready, but it was a working landscape of countless makers, breakers, fabricators, and deliverers. It was a living area, an industrial ecosystem, and not the empty wasteland it has been rewritten as to suit a narrative of gentrification.




A network of small businesses from wholefood suppliers to stained glass window artists, furniture upholsterers to mechanics were compulsory-purchased away from an area many had worked in for decades. As small businesses, they often relied upon each other for knowledge, materials, and workforce, and after being forced away from the area – often to places much further away due to costs of relocating and properties – many of the firms were forced to close, and countless communities were destroyed.

Some of the assorted Olympic buildings have continued as their sport intended (such as the Hopkins-designed Velodrome) while others have at great expense to the taxpayer been as-well-as-gifted to rich companies (the Popukous-designed Olympic stadium to West Ham United). The whole site is dominated by the ugly Westfield shopping centre, acting as a Lobster pot to funnel everybody going to or from Stratford stations through funnels of bland consumerism and neoliberal private spaces. One building, the Allies and Morrison-designed Media Centre, had however struggled to find new life after 2012. A huge box that once housed the world’s sporting press, it was simply too large in scale, plan, and detail to suit many functions. Rebranded HereEast, a small part of it houses the Wayne McGreggor Dance company, UCL use part of it for its architecture students. Now, a huge chunk of the building has become London’s newest, and one of the world’s most unique and exciting, cultural spaces – V&A East Storehouse.

Other recent years, the Victoria and Albert Museum has greatly expanded out of its grand West London buildings. One of the greatest legacies of the 1852 Great Exhibition, the institution’s wide archive of design objects – from fashion to architecture, products to graphics – are also presented in their Young V&A in Bethnal Green and in the Kengo Kuma ziggurat that is V&A Dundee. Next Spring, V&A East opens, a O'Donnell + Tuomey building that forms part of a grand terrace oc cultural organisations including UCL and Sadlers Well, a somewhat chaotic clash of architectural ideas awkwardly compressed together between Zaha Hadid’s Olympic Swimming Pool and West Ham’s stadium.




Before that more traditional museum and gallery building opens, however, the V&A have launched Storehouse, and it’s unlike any museum experience anywhere in the world. The former media centre had been earmarked to become a huge data centre, but after that plan fell through the V&A spotted it as a space to store the majority of their 500,000 items – albeit with a different approach to the usual storage lockup. This one is open to the public, free to access and peruse the eclectic mix of design objects arranged across kilometres of shelving stacks. While the main home of the V&A may be a headspinning fizz of juxtaposition, unexpected encounters, and introduction to everything design from Cartier to concrete, Storehouse is that on acid.

The architectural approach, however, is simple, and takes a welcome step back from the richness of everything packed within. New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro led a project that belies their frequent statement moments (they were the designers of London’s welcomingly-cancelled New Music Centre and also of the New York Hudson Yards blingtastic Shed). A visitor may not even notice their architecture, which here is a good thing as the building is about personal passage and self-led discovery rather than a didactic, traditional museum experience.




Their main, and most present, architectural act is to punch a well through the centre of the 80m squared, four-storey floorplan of the publicly-accessible area of the building. It creates a huge atrium toplit by neat panels of uniform LED lighting which visitors burst into from a narrow staircase from ground level. While only one for those with no mobility issues, it is a true moment of arrival, and it is not just a spatial arrival but one into a a whole new kind of cultural space. Looking up and to each side, tall stacks of shelves are packed with assorted items once secreted within dark, hidden basements and bunkers. This is, the V&A team are keen to say, “your collection”, and so here it is, presented like the last rooms of IKEA or the Argos back of house, offered up in all its innocence for aesthetic pleasure and unexpected juxtaposition.

A motorbike sits beneath ceramic plates. A double bass stands taller than its neighbouring ancient architectural column. There is a 1990-91 West Ham football shirt. There are fragments of carved stone ornamentation, 1960s furniture, theatre costume, glassware, gay pride paraphernalia, ritual masks, shop signage, and much, much, much, much more. Comparatively, these are all small items compared to some of the larger pieces of the collection, especially the five large architectural fragments hard-wired into the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro architecture

Those fragments – a word used at the largest scale possible – are more than just incidental moments in the architecture of the space, but in some instances even set out the parameters of the new construction. On the ground floor, a 17th century Agra Colonnade, a remarkable series of Mughal pillars from the bathhouse of the fort of Agra, are used to set out the ceiling height. The heights of the two floors above are determined by a heavy concrete chunk of Robin Hood Gardens that is seemingly suspended from the DS&R metal framework, but in fact is structurally built in, also creating the balcony depth of the levels looking into the central atrium.




Other fragments are equally as impressive in the space and important to design history. A complete 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed office sits within a wooden framework in an uncanny reminder that entire interior is a design object. A 15th century carved and gilded wooden ceiling from a lost Spanish palace is held in space as if it had always been there and the 21st century building had appeared around it. The seminal Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926 before being rolled out in its thousands across the Soviet Union and becoming the forerunner of today’s fitted kitchen. A huge, dark space dedicated to theatre backdrops opens with the largest Picasso work in the world from a 1924 Ballets Russes production of Le Train Bleu.

This is not a museum. There is not gallery or museum presentation, there is no overarching curated narrative, no ticketed exhibition. It is, as the name suggests, a storehouse, and you are free to peruse and make your own connections – though there are numerous interjections into the sublime storage that offer a little light upon either the items or their life in the institution. These might be about the object itself, such as a broad display about Robin Hood Gardens, social housing, and the historic and current communities who it may speak to, but also about very industry-leaning issues: indexing, labelling, packaging and transport. This sounds dry, but it isn’t, and it could be a critical eye-opener for a teenage visitor who until now might otherwise believe that exhibitions and culture just emerges in its finished state, and didn’t require industry, expertise, and systems that not only bring it to life but could be their future dream career.

The architecture of the place also allows moments to look into these systems. Windows and balconies overlook conservation and research spaces, while as an active storage unit visitors will undoubtedly encounter workers moving items in and out of the space as they go to or return from exhibitions or restoration. It is an active building with the intent that items will regularly shift around, that anybody working for the team can create new labels or displays, and where visitors get a glimpse into the deep and fascinating world of the archive when it’s not momentarily on display.




It does, however, ask questions about what an archive is for. If only a fraction of an institution’s collection is ever on display then here the V&A start a conversation around access, ownership, agency, and purpose of storage. They also have a system where you can “order an object” and reserve a slot to order any object from the half million they own to be delivered to a desk for your study, analysis, or sheer pleasure. By fronting and centring so many items hitherto hidden from view, it may also invite questions around why institutions such as the V&A should own but rarely show objects from colonial histories and communities who may prefer them to be closer to home.

It also invites deeper questions around the cultural industry’s relationship to gentrification. All around the V&A East Storehouse, rather cheap-looking but undoubtedly extremely expensive flats are popping up on what was once part of the park. It was always the intent that over time the much of the green expanse leftover from the Olympics would slowly be parcelled up and built on by developers, but the increasingly small amount of greenery is is compressed between soulless, sad, and unaffordable new lumps of London. Inside, Storehouse there may have excellently presented moments such as that relating to Robin Hood Gardens, speaking to working class or under-represented stories, but the fact of the matter is that a section of what was once social housing was saved for the V&A collection while the people who lived there were forcibly removed from their homes. Similarly, the institution itself may celebrate the rich history of artisanal making and craft, but it does so from a landscape that was again forcibly removed from people who made and crafted every day, a landscape that was reinvented and prettified to the benefit of huge capital uplift but arguably which damaged critical ecosystems in East London.

These are not solely issues related to the V&A, but their Storehouse does thrust them into the light. Storehouse is a joy, and museums partly exist to open such difficult questions around agency and ownership, and to retain objects, ideas, and knowledge an unknown futures. The opening exhibition at the other new V&A East building next year will focus on the history of Black music, and there is similarly real, sincere, work here at Storehouse to engage with new audiences, and to think around new modes of engagement for those and as yet unknown audiences.




Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s architecture is subservient to the wider project, objects, and visitors. With dimensions and programme set out from those large historic fragments as well as the various storage systems and networks of movement needed, it is more factory than gallery, and all the better for it. This and the artisanal content may accidentally speak to the history of the area removed for the Olympic project, but it is one which the V&A can build on and into even if it is arguably a reworking of the long-repeated model of industry to culture, blue-collar to white-collar, making to consuming that gentrification across the world follows.

Storehouse will annoy many visitors. By more being a meta-museum than a museum, those expecting a traditional experience, who suffer from vertigo, or who see a fascinating object that has no label or contextual help other than “an architectural model” or “a 1960s chair” will take some time to get used to this new offer. But for the thrilling joy of aesthetic discovery, accidental juxtaposition and cultural collision, and opening up thousands of objects the public owns so the public can see them, it’s a revolutionary prospect.