Ed Vaizey: V&A East Storehouse Is A Welcome Step Change For Museums

The V&A has just opened a new venue – V&A East Storehouse in London’s Olympic Park. Ed Vaizey steps inside.

View of the Weston Collections Hall at V&A East Storehouse. (© David Parry/PA Media Assignments)

Inside V&A East Storehouse With Ed Vaizey

The opening of V&A East Storehouse is a great moment, and marks a step change in how museums engage with the public. It’s exactly what it says it is: a purpose-built, 16,000 sq/m storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and containing a treasure trove of objects normally kept in the proverbial basement. Now they are on display, informally, and can be seen by the public.

It’s a great moment for me as well, because it is the manifestation of a decision I took 14 years ago when I was the arts minister. I can still remember exactly where I was when this process began. In 2011, Ian Blatchford had just taken over as the director of the Science Museum (he still is). He invited me to a place called Blythe House, a huge Edwardian building in Hammersmith behind Olympia, built in 1898, which used to be the Post Office Savings Bank. You may well have passed it, or seen it in films (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and wondered what it was.

When it closed in 1979, nobody knew what to do with it, so Margaret Thatcher gave it to three museums – the Science Museum, the British Museum and the V&A. From that day on, the museums used it as a place to store their collections. It was obviously an absurd situation. The building was not fit for purpose, with barely any climate control and very difficult to access. Blatchford pointed this out to me, and said we should sell the building and give the money to the three museums to build new state-of-the-art storage sites.

View of the Weston Collections Hall, which features over 100 mini curated displays, at V&A East Storehouse. (© David Parry/PA Media Assignments)

I agreed with him and set about doing so. But it was not a simple process. One museum, which had just spent £4 million upgrading some areas of the building for its collection, threatened to sue me. And then there was the chicken-and-egg problem. Upfront money was needed to pay for the decanting of the collections, as well as the building of new sites, before the building itself could be sold and its value realised.

I managed to get George Osborne to stump up £150 million and the process began. It’s one of those unsung hero stories that gets very little coverage. All three museums set about cataloguing, digitising and packing up literally millions of objects and moving them to new locations. The Science Museum has a disused airfield at Wroughton, near Swindon, which they recently opened and offers guided tours. The British Museum has the Archaeological Research Centre (ARC, geddit?) in the Thames Valley, in partnership with the University of Reading; it’s not open to the public, but local schools and community groups can visit. And now we have V&A East Storehouse.

This is a pioneering moment in how museums operate. We can and should do more to make sure the places where museums keep their collections are open (as much as possible) to the public as well as scholars. We should be very proud of how smoothly this whole operation has gone and how one quick meeting on a rooftop in central London has had such an impact.

Multi-purpose conservation studio, visible by the Conservation Overlook, at V&A East Storehouse. (© David Parry, PA Media Assignments)

VISIT

V&A East Storehouse is officially open, and admission is free.

Times: Open daily from 10am to 6pm, closing at the later time of 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Address: Parkes Street, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick, London E20 3AX

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