V&A East Storehouse, a new site of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), opened in Stratford in London on the 31st May 2025. The archives which hold art, design, performance and more, experienced a prolonged closure while moving from Blythe House to a new home in East London. Heralded as ‘a new kind of museum experience’ they offer ‘a chance to see the behind the scenes of a working museum’ giving the public the opportunity to see for themselves….
According to the wall text the building is ‘designed’ with ‘maximum transparency’ in mind. The main area open to the public is an illuminated inner chamber made up of four levels, with a hollowed out centre to enable visibility of the storage facility through the centre. A façade of the social housing demolished to make way for the new building floats as a reminder that objects can erase people by cleaving aesthetics from experience. The construction of plywood and metal fixtures, glass and concrete, have been likened to an IKEA warehouse. Yet the arrangements of objects also bring to mind the Victorian ‘plenitude’ of the original Museum by founder Henry Cole.
The V&A, originally named the ‘South Kensington Museum’, was built from the 1851 Great Exhibition, the first in a series of world’s fairs of culture and industry that continued into the twentieth century. Organised by Cole and Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert; the Exhibition intertwined ‘good design’ with racial capitalism through colonial sovereignty. British design reformers aimed to work against social and environmental ills of industrialisation by ‘improving’ the public’s ‘taste’ through theirs; but in doing so they undoubtably reinforced the soft power of the colonial project. Cole augmented the museum through an essentialising principle which joined together Britain and its colonies writing: ‘I think there are certain principles of taste which all eminent artists are agreed upon in all parts of the world’. A map in the new Museum points to areas of ‘the origins of the V&A’s framed textiles’ extracted across its empire, without acknowledging how or why they got to the Museum. These things matter: the V&A holds a unique position in British design education as their displays and collections were (and still are) used to train students. The Museum also formulated a design pedagogy which sought social change. The cumulative impact of the Great Exhibition, the South Kensington Museum and later the V&A is linked to cultural engagements through leisure; and it had a profound effect on design education, class and taste, and the mass production of ‘popular’ culture.
Decontextualised objects are grouped in modular displays facing out from each aisle. In many ways, the aesthetics uncritically reinforce Cole’s foundational values, including the linking of objects with taste. I think of what Sianne Ngai calls the ‘zany and cute’, problem of an aesthetic dynamic which encourages contemplation of a visually ‘warm and fuzzy’ curio through intellectual disjuncture: the ‘cool’ detachment of reflection by the observer in a museum. That the objects cannot be used is understandable. Nevertheless, the absence of display cases, for instance, gestures toward an openness through physical proximity. These objects hold their own histories; and interpretation will depend on personal and cultural understanding as much as the ‘framework of knowledge’ presented. In this case, the Museum’s ‘innovative’ optics seemingly reproduce Victorian connoisseurial relations of closeness and distance; mirroring British white ontology including the sensual ways of looking cultivated through Hegel’s orientalism by Pater, which affected Pugin and Ruskin and was put into practice in the Museum by Morris and Cole.
A hook of the new site is that it is a ‘working museum’ ─ but I wonder what it is like to work in. In July, I visited the Storehouse to use the Archive of Art and Design, which is by appointment, with a two-week waiting list, unlike the open stacks which can be visited by the public any day. I worked in a room on the outside of the building, which includes ‘behind the scenes’ zones for research unlike the transparent and open ‘front’ more easily available to the public. The open stacks present a fraction of the holdings of 2.8 million objects; this selection is presumably what V&A are happy with the public viewing.
As a researcher the experience of returning to the collections, including conversations with the staff was an intellectual delight that have been greatly missed. Nevertheless, I found the contrasting experience, between the pre-booked, quiet archive and busy, bright open storage disorientating. The motion and flow of people provides a heightened quality of spectacle. A friend suggests that the interaction provides an animating quality which brings the site alive. But the archivists and conservators are working around the public. I wonder if this loss of privacy comes as an added pressure. The literal transparency of space could be viewed as surveillance of the staff’s daily duties; why would we need to ‘see research happening’? Given that design was for Cole a social ‘science’; the site looks like a gigantic glass case featuring live human specimens.
Given that opacity is a fundamental tool of dignity for colonized and enslaved people, and resistance to racial capitalism, I am left feeling uncertain of the politics of transparency, visibility and our participation in this. Say, for a moment, that the ‘lightness’ of transparency is a neoliberal aesthetic of concealment, to what extent might the building’s plan reinscribe ideological whiteness? The Storehouse has been compared to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, whose team have actively been fighting for restitution and to decolonise their collections for years; the issue of their Victorian cabinets remains a point of contestation due to the imperial mode of display and Dan Hick’s new book points to colonial relations between both Museums. That the purpose-built Storehouse is intended to look like a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ reanimates colonial taxonomies of knowledge at the point in which we are trying to take them apart. The enlightenment ‘Wunderkammer’ is the emblem of imperial conceptions of value and power, a visual template of Western coloniality. As Arindam Dutta and Saloni Mathur make clear, British design is historically enmeshed with the imperial project through the Museum. Much of the founding collection was amassed by East India Company’s plundering from across South Asia. Looted objects and British designers’ responses to these ‘source’ materials are also contained within the archive. Unfortunately, resonances of this phantasmagoric have recurred in the reception of the new site, which has been referred to as an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’.
This troubles me because as a student designer I was trained in these collections. We used displays as reference points which were adapted to develop new patterns, textures, and forms. Now, if this was occurring uncritically I would understand this as extraction and appropriation. This knowledge makes different types of epistemic violence in higher education visible, including breaks between the differing systems of design, history and politics. Above all designers must have the opportunity to gain knowledge of the history and politics of their discipline through curation, as this remains a core resource for new knowledge. Without critical awareness of British design practice itself the new functions risk replaying old problems. Using an archived object without knowledge of its history, or that of the V&A to produce ‘new ideas’ is not a benign practice but one that can facilitate imperial logics of production.
Enhanced visitor access and accessibility in the Storehouse includes a new scheme through which anyone can ‘Order an Object’ (up to five objects). Which returns us to the Storehouse as a site for education today. The tagline is that, at V&A East Storehouse, one can ‘Make new discoveries, explore untold stories and share ideas’; which seems to follow the V&A’s maxim ‘All of this for all of you’. But what and who design is ‘for’ remains a live political issue. Who is using this function, and how? If the V&A holdings are being upheld as a model of ‘good design’ the new space should acknowledge that the ‘this’ and ‘you’ are complex matters.
If the collection is intended as ‘a sourcebook for your creativity’, then it is most important to consider how the Storehouse may be used to reconsider ethics and aesthetics in design today. For instance, how might the imperial order of a ‘sourcebook’ be taken apart as a methodology to think against thorny areas of the Museum’s heritage while developing new interpretive works? Might this be an opportunity for collaboration? Designers, researchers and the public could be supported to explore new methodologies together through difficult questions, from imperial history and its present to neocolonialism and the climate crisis. A great deal of design education is collaborative, socially engaged and care-oriented, which is showcased in the V&A’s current exhibition Design and Disability. In this way I am reminded that the organisation is made up of many different parts which cannot be reduced solely to the aesthetics of the new building.
When ‘all of this’ is offered to ‘all of you’ I think the issue remains, that the ‘this’ being offered is not only the form of an object, but the Museum itself. In its own way the site is illustrative of the issue: designers are not expected to have a joined-up understanding of aesthetics as politics. Easily dismissed in the humanities as commodity fetish and assumed lesser due to the moral supremacy of the fine arts, designed aesthetics can be seen as innocuous due to the hierarchical order of the imperial project. The Storehouse presents an opportunity to reconsider this oversight by recognising the power of practice and use. On the one hand, British design education has inherited racialised asymmetrical biopower including orientalist frameworks that have affected the British’s understanding of the colonial past. On the other, design has a future momentum: it is social, connective and holds possibility to remake the world. Between these tensions there is possibility for meaningful dialogue over accountability and social change. I hold some hope that the Storehouse may be used to foster new solidarity and alliance; to explore the material roots of Britian’s colonial history and its afterlives; including the encroaching ethics of virtual reality today.
This article has been amended to clarify the attribution of ‘all of this for all of you’ to Henry Cole. Although it is unclear where this phrase originated, it is often used in the V&A’s promotional material as Cole’s ‘mantra.