You can’t escape it: this is the same colonial museum we know, in a shiny new suit
You’ll find it on a spit of land in a meander of the A12 in East London, between Hackney Cut and the River Lea. It’s where the dog-racing track used to be. On Sundays thousands used to flock here to the flea market to buy bric-a-brac of uncertain provenance. Then the stadium was bulldozed in 2003, part of the clearances, displacements and compulsory purchase orders for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Twenty years ago the photographer Stephen Gill was walking these streets, documenting anticipatory fragments of a landscape in transition, traces of the near future that became a book called Archaeology in Reverse (2007). Today we’re 13 years into the ‘legacy development’ phase of the 2012 London Olympics, with its promises of regeneration and renewal. The greyhounds are long gone, but there could yet be some stolen goods on display.
The V&A East Storehouse, which opened in Hackney Wick this summer, is hollowed out from the media centre that housed thousands of journalists during the London Olympic Games. The building was bought up by the property developers Delancey, converted by Hawkins\Brown into a tech startup hub, then rebranded as the education and culture campus Here East. At first glance this leased, multi-tenant, 115,000-square-metre lot could hardly be more different from what former Mayor of London and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once called ‘the mothership’ – the original Victoria and Albert Museum, eight miles away in SW7. But look closer. As Mayor of London, Johnson named this place ‘Olympicopolis’, drawing a quite possibly absurd parallel between the legacy of London 2012 and that of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the museums and colleges of South Kensington’s ‘Albertopolis’. In 2025 as the V&A unpacks its collections in what’s now being called the East Bank cultural quarter, is history repeating itself? Or is the past catching up with the present?
They parachuted a colonial museum into East London once before. In 1856 The Builder magazine called the first galleries at Kensington Gore, a collection of corrugated iron sheds erected just weeks after the end of the Crimean War, a ‘melancholy construction’, ‘utterly and indefensibly ugly’ and ‘a threefold monster boiler’. The so-called ‘Brompton boilers’ were built by an Edinburgh company specialising in prefabricated iron barracks and colonial houses. In 1872 the Department of Science and Art dismantled a section of the boilers and shipped it across town to form the new Bethnal Green Museum (now Young V&A), on the other side of Victoria Park from the Storehouse. Five years later they set up an outpost in Dublin (now the National Museum of Ireland).
Before you go inside Storehouse, look up at the glass exterior. It’s covered with dotted chevrons in a ‘dazzle camouflage’ pattern. This semi-Vorticist design was preferred during the First World War by the painters Norman Wilkinson and Edward Wadsworth, who were serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, to disguise Royal Navy battleships. The RIBA Journal reports that the bright orange oversize lettering is ‘another military reference’ – this time to the lining of bomber jackets. When Delancey retrofitted the building to make it seem ‘vibrant and attractive to the creative sector’, this militarist aesthetic resonated unexpectedly with the V&A’s architectural history. After all, many of the early buildings of Albertopolis were designed and built by officers of the Royal Engineers. Dazzle camouflage is a technology of strategic distortion. Its purpose is not to conceal but to elicit confusion about scale and perspective. You might hold that thought as you walk through the museum doors.
A welcome sign promises ‘maximum transparency and unprecedented access’. The publicity material describes Storehouse as ‘a chance to see behind the scenes of a working museum’. So you walk up the narrow stairway and through two airlock-like doors. The staginess of the ‘slow reveal’ of the three-storey Weston Collections Hall has a bravado reminiscent of Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 self-portrait The Artist in His Museum. At the cost of unspecified tens of millions, the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have recreated a classic colonial-era museum: two mezzanine galleries above a main court, an uncanny simulacrum of Edinburgh’s Industrial Museum of Scotland (renamed the Royal Scottish Museum, now part of National Museum of Scotland) or Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (where I am a curator) rendered in walkways made of steel grating, glass railings and adjustable pallet racking. The suggestion of a glass roof is even conjured by huge LED panels on the ceiling of this windowless chronotope. Step forward onto a glass floor. Beneath your feet a portrait plaque of Prince Albert sneers up at you: oiled muttonchops, pink skin, white cravat and the badge of the Order of the Garter with its maxim honi soit qui mal y pense (‘Shame on those who think ill of this’).
Above your head there’s a ten-tonne fragment of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1972 brutalist Poplar, East London, social housing estate Robin Hood Gardens. The fragment’s purchase by the V&A and subsequent exhibition at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale (with an accompanying videowork by the artist Do Ho Suh) was decried in The Times as ‘achingly pretentious’, and denounced by many as a theft worthy of Lord Elgin and an exercise in art-washing working-class heritage. The museum’s director Tristram Hunt responded by attacking any idea of museums as ‘vehicles for social justice’ and defending the role of the arts in regeneration, claiming ‘there were a lot of mountains of fridges and burnt out double-decker buses in this part of London’. Perhaps, as the researcher Sumaya Kassim has suggested, it would be best not to appoint politicians as museum directors. This ‘monument to London’s social cleansing’, an icon of how culture can be weaponised for gentrification, is now the centrepiece of a museum whose landlords Delancey have themselves been criticised for displacing businesses and residents through their Elephant and Castle Town Centre project in South London. In Poplar the final section of Robin Hood Gardens was torn down in March 2025, just weeks before Storehouse opened its doors three miles to the north. The timing recalls something the Smithsons once said. ‘A building which denies what is going on is just the opposite of brutalism – it is chi-chi, which is a sort of evasion… [or] lie.’
The conceit of Storehouse is transparency, as if you were permitted to trespass behind the scenes, and there’s a palpable staginess to this ‘backstage’ access. But open storage is by no means a new idea. The V&A’s own South Kensington galleries for example have over 25,000 ceramics in rooms 137-139 alone. In ‘world culture’ collections meanwhile – from the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Canada to the Musée du quai Branly in Paris or Humboldt Forum in Berlin – it’s been used in a very particular way. The first place to attempt to pull off this trick was arguably the Pitt Rivers during the 1970s. The idea involves trying gently to ease nineteenth- or early twentieth-century colonial-militarist displays of trade, commerce and expeditions back in time, as if they were part of a much older regime of display – the early modern bric-a-brac aesthetic of the wunderkammer. Storehouse tries to repeat this legerdemain, leaning into the decontextualisation to try to cultivate a sense of organised chaos as if all this were nothing but a hapless jumble of curiosities, where joy and inspiration might still be found in eclectic juxtapositions.
At Storehouse, you can see at least a thousand unlabelled items sitting on the shelves. There’s no way of finding out what they are. The decision to have no information about the objects is incomprehensible. Early on in the project Elizabeth Diller described plans for visitors to be able to ‘digitally unpack crates or see through them with X-ray vision and then deploy cameras to other parts of the space that are not visible’. Unsurprisingly, these plans have not yet materialised. Slowly you discover that over 100 ‘mini-displays’ are installed at the end of storage racks. The museum describes this arrangement, for reasons best known to itself, as ‘hacked’. They will be changed from time to time. Some have one or two objects, others more, perhaps 750 objects in total, almost all from the UK. No object labels, again, just 30 short texts on seemingly random themes. If the WiFi’s working (it wasn’t when I visited) a QR code will launch a webpage with some explanation about what’s displayed. Otherwise you can try to locate one of the bundles of printouts of those webpages in plastic folders. Or you can walk around not knowing what you’re looking at, which is what most people seem to do. Never mind a museum without walls, this is a museum without labels.
One display is ‘guest-curated’ by the museum’s royal patron Kate Middleton (who’s married to the Prince of Wales). She has even penned a gallery text. ‘Objects can tell a story,’ she writes. ‘A collection of objects can create a narrative, both about our past and as inspiration for the future… Individual, unique objects can come together to create a collective whole that helps us to explore our social and cultural experiences, and the role we play in the wider tapestry of life.’ And if you haven’t lost the will to live by this point, and if by any chance you’ve got signal, then you could find out about the 14 objects she chose for the display. There’s a smudgy watercolour of a forest glade by Beatrix Potter, a medieval tile with a lion passant from Keynsham Abbey, a Welsh patchwork bedcover, a Victorian portrait of a lady sniffing a daisy, and a porcelain Qing vase.
Any sense of coherence gradually dissolves. Why is a steel shield from Jaipur collected by Lord Curzon juxtaposed with a seventeenth-century English rocking-horse? Why is a copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Flashman on the March (2005) displayed next to an unread copy of Frantz Fanon’s posthumous collection of essays Toward the African Revolution (1964)? Why have they stuck a fake bust of Nefertiti in Frank Lloyd Wright’s office for Edgar J Kaufmann? Nobody knows. Amidst the chaos, one stand-out display, curated by the V&A East Youth Collective Community and historian Hannah Young, addresses objects from ‘an enslaver we choose not to name’. (Predictably the one criticism of V&A East Storehouse that the Guardian critic Jonathan Jones made in his 5-star review was that ‘it would be better history to name the enslaver’.) And in this momentary break in the museum’s ambivalent silences and sillinesses you glimpse what a genuine ‘hack’ through community curation might look like. Which begs the question: what are we not being shown? Not what’s hidden exactly, but what is being strategically distracted from, the dreadnaught behind the dazzle. To answer that question we’re going to have to do some number crunching.
Everyone knows that the V&A and the British Museum have been failing in their twin statutory duties to care for their collections and ‘secure that the objects are available to persons seeking to inspect them’ for decades. In 1988 a National Audit Office report castigated both institutions for failing to undertake basic inventories. The collections were mostly housed in a joint museum facility at Blythe House in West Kensington. In 2015 the government announced plans to sell the building. The resulting decant offered a unique opportunity. After some delays the British Museum eventually responded with an ambitious and visionary ‘Documentation and Digitisation Programme’, promising to have their entire collection digitally catalogued by 2029. The V&A’s response has been starkly different.
The V&A says it holds ‘an ever-evolving national collection of over 2.8 million objects’, including 1.1 million books in the National Art Library. The 2023-24 annual report confirmed that there are ‘1,697,410 museum objects and works of art’. But search the database and only 1,292,939 objects come up. Hundreds of thousands of objects seem to be missing from the public database. Back in January 2010, the museum stated its collection comprised 2,742,809 items. Then in 2016 over 400,000 objects from the Royal Photographic Society collection were transferred from Bradford, a move criticised at the time as ‘metropolitanism’ and ‘vandalism’. A decade on, 9,029 images from that collection are online. A conservative estimate might suggest there are 2.1 million objects in the V&A collections (plus the library and archives), with some 800,000 missing from the database. That would be a 38 percent deficit, the exact ratio as at the British Museum where perhaps 3 million objects of 8 million objects remain undocumented.
Tristram Hunt has complained about what he calls ‘all of that rubbish we always have to put up with, which is “where’s it all hidden?”’. His deputy Tim Reeve claims the museum is now ‘completely transparent about what we have, why we have it, where it came from’. Arts journalists writing about their flânerie among 250,000 objects have neglected the less glitzy issue of documentation. But there are questions for the leadership and trustees. When will we see the 20,000 items from the East India Company’s museum on the database (just 12,500 are flagged at present)? What human remains are in the collection (an FOI request about that has gone unanswered since 2018)? And if the British Museum can invest in full documentation and digitalisation, then why can’t the V&A?
In the past decade of catastrophic sector-wide decline for arts and culture, the pace and scale with which the V&A has multiplied itself under Hunt’s leadership, to what are now six separate satellite sites, is jawdropping. The V&A has raised what it calls a ‘family’ of museums: satellites that range from the V&A Wedgwood Collection (established while Hunt was MP for Stoke-on-Trent) to V&A Dundee (2018), the rebranded Young V&A (2023), the V&A East Storehouse (2025) and next up V&A East (2026). Four years ago a plan for a root and branch restructuring was headed off and the museum leadership were forced to perform a U-turn of sorts, but an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude has remained: build it and they will pay for it. The reward has been a £9m annual increase in V&A’s grant-in-aid to cover additional running costs for these two new London sites. Just imagine if the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport were to invest this kind of money into the great civic museums outside the M25. The origins of the V&A lay the settler-extractivist dream of the hyperconcentration of art, culture and design from around the world in the metropole. Hunt’s neo-expansionist decade has been about the hyperconcentration of cultural funding and capital investment.
There is transparency and there is the performance of transparency. Storehouses and halls of mirrors. The approach seen in Bethnal Green and Dublin in the 1870s has reappeared in Dundee and Hackney in the twenty-first century. Expeditions to Bradford and Poplar have yielded new kinds of loot. Perhaps V&A East Storehouse will become just a fulfilment centre, resurrecting the V&A’s old patriarchal Circulation Department that loaned objects to regional UK locations from 1909 until former director Sir Roy Strong shut it down in 1977? You could imagine one dystopian, circulationist version of the future where half a billion objects remain neglected, warehoused and uncatalogued across the country while larger museums become mere display halls for select highlights of the national collections: V&A North (Manchester), V&A West (Bristol), V&A Centre (Birmingham), V&A Ireland (Belfast). When the architecture firm Allies and Morrison claimed East London was an empty wasteland, a ‘post-industrial backwater’ that needed culture, it recalled a kind of colonial mentality for which the V&A has form: the extractivism that operates at borderzones, whether battlefield or brownfield, to create dispossessions that endure unless they’re actively dismantled. Like by reimagining museums as ‘vehicles for social justice’, for example.
Genuine transparency will require the V&A channelling its resources into creating a truly comprehensive public database of the artefacts, images and archives that it holds. Until that day comes V&A East Storehouse will be ‘a building which denies what’s going on’ – an exercise in misdirection and spurious transparency by an institution continuing to fail in its statutory duties.
Dan Hicks is Curator of World Archaeology at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. His latest book, Every Monument Will Fall: A story of remembering and forgetting, was published in May 2025
