This is Blythe House, a monumental Edwardian office block round the back of the Olympia exhibition centre.
It was built as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank and housed thousands of staff until the 1960s when the government moved operations to Glasgow. The building was then used as storage space for some of London's biggest museums until a more recent government austerity drive decreed it should be sold off. The Science Museum moved most of their stuff to Swindon, the British Museum are off to Reading and the V&A shifted their repository to the Olympic Park... opening yesterday.
New in E20:V&A East Storehouse Location: Parkes Street, Hackney Wick E20 [map] Open: 10am-6pm (until 10pm Thu, Sat) Admission: free Website:vam.ac.uk/east Four word summary: explore the design archive Time to allow: an hour or two
This is not the new V&A East, the museum outpost on the East Bank which opens next year. This is the Storehouse, the place all the exhibits go when they're not on display, except in this unique installation they actually are. The location is the former Broadcast Centre at the top end of the Olympic Park where all the TV crews hung out in 2012, a humongous shed that's long been in need of a full complement of tenants. The V&A have now moved into the southern end, not the cavity where BT Sport no longer are but a separate four-storey space the size of 30 basketball courts, to use an appropriate sporting analogy. Look for the unassuming door up a sidestreet, easily identified yesterday by the half-hour queue snaking round the side of the building. It should be a lot quieter once opening weekend's over (plus it was well worth the wait).
This is a working building, not a day-out kind of place, so certain important protocols apply. Bags have to go in a locker, and if you read the terms and conditions so do coats, although this wasn't an issue on a sweltery day like Saturday so we'll have to see what counts as inappropriate outerwear. Lockers are free and also interspersed with umpteen frames showcasing samples from the V&A's textile collection, should you choose to notice and pull some out. Most people seemed more beguiled by the cafe, the third East End outpost of the artisanal E5 Bakehouse, who apparently do a sourdough croissant to die for should that be your thing. No food is allowed in the actual Storehouse obviously, nor anything containing liquids so they've got to go in a locker too, and then you can head up the stairs through the protective double doors into, oh blimey.
You wend in through the outer bank of shelves past a selection of busts, one probably Jesus, one likely Shakespeare, although none are readily identified. The ordered chaos of this archival stash is already becoming apparent. But it only fully hits when you finally emerge in the middle of Level 1, an open floor surrounded by walkways on three levels with five millennia of artefacts arrayed all around. Don't expect coherence, just go for an explore and see what you can find, and while you're here look down because below the glass floor is the Agra Colonnade, 18 tons of intricately carved marble from the height of the Mughal Empire. Essentially it's cultural overload but if you do a circuit of all three floors and also follow the multiplicity of dead ends you should see most of everything.
There's a lot of furniture, this being something the V&A's well known for, including wooden chests, drop-tables, wardrobes, writing desks and every kind of chair. They stretch off along long shelves so you may only get a close-up view of some, and in the case of the grandfather clocks an entire room on the ground floor you can merely see the tops of. Elsewhere are a double bass, much glassware, a case of novelty mugs, an indigenous painted mask, two Olympic torches, a BAFTA, several archaic panels, a Calvert road sign, the boxes from a drum kit, Kenneth Grange's kettle, paintings of all ages, kitsch pottery, some kind of Spanish agricultural implement, multiple vases, and somewhere in a forlorn backroom what looked like all the toys and games they removed from the Young V&A in Bethnal Green when they updated it so children enjoyed it rather than their grandparents.
Don't expect to know precisely what everything is. Because this is a storehouse everything has a label but it's not for you, the serial number and bar code are meant to be read by staff instead. Some items are thematically grouped as mini-displays and do have proper information boards but the vast majority are merely there because the main museum doesn't currently need them. Occasional QR codes are provided so you can find out more, plus a big QR code at the entrance that leads to an index page from which you can explore all the chief pieces on each level. Why print stuff when visitors can do all the electronic legwork on their phone? However I couldn't get any of these QR codes to work, not a single one, because the mobile signal wasn't strong enough. Perhaps it was thick walls, perhaps it was Day One crowds, but functionally it was disastrous that the V&A were relying on a digital catalogue it was impossible to read.
Tucked in among all this cultural hotchpotch are six special large-scale exhibits, some to be found in unexpectedly massive galleries at the end of an innocuous gangway. The biggest wow is either the Torrijos Ceiling, a 15th century gilded monster painstakingly transferred from Spain, or the 11m-high ballet backcloth of two cavorting women signed by Picasso in the corner. Two entire rooms have been incorporated, one the pioneering Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926, the other an intensely wood-panelled boardroom by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Kaufmann Office. Most obvious will be an entire chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, the Poplar housing solution otherwise now fully demolished, with two concrete panels adorning the central balcony, plus a stairwell and apartment somehow preserved behind. The Storehouse clearly has no lack of ambition.
Brilliantly if you do want to get fully acquainted with a particular object you can make an appointment and a museum curator will let you get gloves-on, although you have to submit your reservation at least two weeks in advance. A few select objects are however chosen for daily scrutiny by a small group - yesterday a 1940s Pye Radio and an Edo period tea ceremony utensil box - check the noticeboard in the foyer for details. There's also a balcony on the top floor where you can look down into a conservation room equipped with washing machines, cutting boards and a table where staff can be seen carefully polishing a set of brass goblets, or whatever they're tending to when you drop by. Come back in mid-September and they should also have opened The David Bowie Centre where fans of the great artist can squeal amidst his archive....like everything else on site all for free.
I see the V&A Storehouse rather as a modern version of Sir John Soane's Museum, a treasure trove of jumbled treasures crammed into all corners intended to be admired rather than understood. Curators also promise an ever-changing canvas, so the mini-display you see today may well have been swapped for something entirely different next time you visit as a quarter of a million objects shuffle round. If you'd like to see what you're missing this page on the Storehouse website gives an excellent overview of what a visit's like, ostensibly for accessibility reasons. You might also want to look through the QR-coded index in advance in case it doesn't work on your phone, because the level of drill-down information is excellent, or else just turn up like everyone else and gawp and guess and grin.
