Inside V&A East Storehouse, A Radical Rethink of What a Museum Can Be

Walk into the V&A East Storehouse and the first thing that hits you is the scale. Half a million objects sit in a vast former Olympic press building, from eighteenth century paintings to netsuke small enough to balance on a fingertip. Decades of curatorial care are visible everywhere. Lacquer sits in climate controlled cabinets, textiles stretch across rolling racks, and fragile objects sleep in precisely engineered housings.

But the real story here is not storage, it is access. Because the team behind V&A East has spent eight years building something far more ambitious than a store. They have built a new system of cultural entry, designed around the needs and imaginations of young people in East London.

And they did it with one provocative question in mind: what if a stored collection could be as easy to use as a library?

Why Young People Were Placed at the Center

Young Londoners today face what Georgia Haseldine, a Senior Curator at V&A East calls the biggest questions of our time, from climate change to social cohesion to the future of cities. The V&A collection, she argues, holds millions of prompts, prototypes and provocations that can help them think through these challenges.

And East London, historically one of the beating hearts of British making, is a fitting place to locate that experiment. Creativity has run through this part of the city for centuries. The move into the retrofitted Olympic press building therefore feels less like an imposition and more like a return to form.

The Youth Collective: When Young People Become the Experts

If young people are the target audience, the obvious next question is: what do they want?

For Afia Yeboah, a Creative Producer at V&A East, the answer was clear. You ask them.

She founded the Youth Collective as a pilot five years ago and it quickly became a structural part of the V&A East project. Members are paid as consultants and take part in decisions about everything from gallery design to the cafe to the curatorial themes that will shape both Storehouse and the future V&A East Museum.

Young people know their own communities. They know what feels relevant, what feels condescending, what feels fun. And their fingerprints are all over the institution because of it.

Opening the Museum Career Pipeline

One of the major ambitions of V&A East is to show young people that creative careers are real, varied, and possible.

Two strategies stand out.

First, Storehouse is filled with mini displays highlighting behind the scenes museum roles: conservation, interpretation, AV production, tech, visitor experience. Careers that often remain invisible are suddenly on show.

Second, the Youth Collective meet artists, designers, curators, filmmakers, and museum teams. The sessions range from hands on workshops to joint curation of events. These moments are not add ons. They are resume starters. Some Youth Collective alumni have already moved into roles at the V&A and other institutions.

The institution backs up these intentions with real commissioning power. Recent work with Youth Collective alumnus Xaymaca saw him direct a beautifully crafted film on the Frankfurt Kitchen, supported by an early career poet and photographer, also part of the Collective. V&A East provided production support, location access, and a platform. They created something that benefits the museum and simultaneously builds creative careers.

Order An Object: The Access System That Changes Everything

Access is not an abstract value at V&A East. It takes the shape of a tool any museum professional might secretly wish they had invented: Order an Object.

Anyone can go online, pick up to five objects from the V&A collection, choose a time slot, and come in to see them. If the fragility rating allows it, they can handle the objects too.

This small idea has huge consequences. It turns a store into a lab. It makes collections useful to artists, students, designers, researchers, and curious locals. It also generated 20 new jobs, filled mostly by local residents who now form a dedicated Collections Access team.

The ethos is simple. If they can say yes, they will.

Micro Residencies, Fellowships, and the Freedom to Experiment

To help people cross the threshold, V&A East runs micro residencies titled Look What I Found. Artists come in, order objects, explore, and then run public show and tell sessions. Fellowships provide more structured, longer term research opportunities.

Throughout all of this, the curatorial approach is intentionally less rigid than traditional museum structures. Objects are placed next to unexpected companions. Themes cross geographies and centuries. Instead of offering conclusions, displays pose questions.

This is not a museum that instructs. It is a museum that invites.

The Label System Built for Agility

Museums have many strengths. Agility is rarely one of them. But Storehouse wanted to change that too.

The team created a template based interpretation system with fixed formats and word counts that can be produced quickly by curatorial staff. It means displays can evolve as fast as the ideas behind them.

Youth Collective members have co produced labels using this system. In live writing sessions, text is drafted together, tested against accessibility guidelines, placed directly into templates, and printed within minutes. It is immediate, collaborative, and refreshingly transparent.

Co producing Creativity with Local Communities

V&A East is not only working with young people. Their co production work with local communities, such as residents connected to Robin Hood Gardens, has brought lived experience into the heart of the building.

You can hear the voices of former residents in the gallery. You can watch dance collaborations created through partnerships. And soon, the V&A will house its first community archive, built from donated materials that trace the story of Robin Hood Gardens from 1972 to the present.

This is not community engagement as a bolt on. It is community engagement as infrastructure.

Make Space: Creativity Without Hierarchy

Make Space emerged from one recurring message in consultations with teachers, youth workers, and young people: they needed a place to make things together.

Sessions are deliberately non hierarchical. Staff, young people, youth workers, and professional artists all make side by side. It is a space for skill building, trust building, and redefining what creative practice can look like.

A Museum Rooted Locally, Thinking Globally

Since opening in May, V&A East Storehouse has gained a new challenge. How does the institution stay grounded in its relationships with local communities while continuing to evolve its curatorial and creative ambitions?

For Afia, the answer is to keep talking with the people who helped build it, and to watch closely how audiences use the Storehouse now that the doors are open. The work is not finished. It is only entering its next phase.

V&A East Storehouse is part collection, part civic space, part creative engine. It is asking a bold question that other museums will inevitably face.

What happens when you treat access not as a program, but as a principle?

At V&A East, the early results suggest something powerful. Young people step in, creativity steps up, and a museum becomes not just a place to look at objects, but a place to use them.

Amy Davy, Georgia Haseldine, Afia Yeboah and Sophie Hoffman from V&A East spoke at the Creative Museums Summit 2025.