V&A East Storehouse

The V&A built a building where the storage is the exhibit. Four levels of the old London 2012 broadcast centre, 16,000 square metres of racking, and a walkway that puts you level with the shelves. You walk in off Parkes Street for nothing, and nobody checks a ticket.

That is the whole proposition, and it is genuinely unusual. A museum normally shows you the 3% it has curated. This one shows you the racking — 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books, 1,000 archives — and lets you read the shelf labels.

Two V&A Easts, and this is the Hackney Wick one

The correction first, because listings get this wrong constantly and a wrong turn here costs you half an hour.

V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum are two separate buildings. This page is the Storehouse: 2 Parkes Street, E20 3AX, inside Here East, on the Hackney Wick side of the park. It opened 31 May 2025.

The Museum is at 107 Carpenters Road, E20 2AR, over on the Stratford side, and it opened 18 April 2026 — eleven months later.

The trap is the umbrella name. "V&A East" is the project, not a place, so a headline like Time Out's The V&A East Will Open This Weekend from April 2026 is about the Museum — while the Storehouse had already been open a year. The article itself is careful; the card in a feed is not.

They are roughly a kilometre apart, which is a walk, not a trek. But an opening time, a review or a ticket attached to one tells you nothing reliable about the other.

The £5 nobody has updated

Here is the fact most likely to catch you out. The David Bowie Centre is no longer free.

The V&A's own FAQ is blunt about it: "You will need a ticket to access the David Bowie Centre from Monday 13 July 2026." The display page now lists £5.00, concessions available, free for Members, and the site's own booking data flags it as ticketed rather than free.

For most of its first ten months it was not. It opened 13 September 2025 on free timed tickets, and from February 2026 you could simply walk in. Anything written in that window — and a lot of it is still the top result — tells you the Bowie archive is free. It has not been since July.

Five pounds for 200 curated pieces out of an 80,000-item archive is not a scandal. Discovering it at the desk is just annoying, which is the only reason this paragraph exists.

Order an Object, and why two weeks matters

The Storehouse's real party trick is Order an Object: pick up to five things out of the store, and staff bring them to a table for you, free.

The catch is lead time. Appointments must be booked at least two weeks in advance. Sessions run one to four hours, plus fifteen minutes of handling briefing, and over-16s can do it unaccompanied.

So if you are planning the week of 7 September 2026, that door is shut — book now for late September instead. It is the single best thing here and it is the one thing you cannot decide to do on the day.

What to actually walk to

Do not miss the Robin Hood Gardens facade: three storeys of the Smithsons' 1970–72 Poplar estate, cut out before demolition and hung inside the hall. A building fragment stored at the scale of a building is the clearest argument this place makes about what a collection is for.

Then Es Devlin's The Everythingists, free, in Gallery 2 from 3 September to 18 October 2026 — an animated shadow piece answering Goncharova's 1926 Firebird backdrop, which lights up every 90 seconds. Two more free displays run to the same date: Lawrence Lek's Guanyin II: The Caretaker and Shahed Saleem's I Was Born Here.

One dated thing this week, and the dispute behind it

Thursday 10 September 2026, 12:00–14:00: Look What I Found with Remiiya Badru, free, drop-in, no booking, in the Collection Hall. Badru is artist in residence at Cody Dock on the River Lea, and the session is a show-and-tell of her research into textiles, dyes and river histories.

It was originally scheduled for Saturday 5 September. It moved because the building was shut.

The Storehouse and the Museum closed on 4 and 5 September 2026 for a strike by PCS and Prospect members, and reopened on the 6th. Those two days are the entire closure — but an overtime ban, work-to-rule and withdrawal of cooperation began on 4 September and continue indefinitely, and the dispute is unresolved.

The Storehouse is not incidental to it. Prospect reported that 100% of collections access officers here voted to strike, on an 88% turnout, and described conditions in which staff "are not entitled to morning or afternoon breaks, making it difficult for staff to take a drink of water or use the toilet during their shift." The collections access officers are the people who carry your ordered object to the table. Read the V&A's alert banner the morning you travel rather than trusting this page.

Hours, queues and the day this belongs to

Daily 10:00–18:00, Thursday and Saturday to 22:00. Free, no booking.

On queues, the V&A says so itself: "At busy times, for your safety, we may need to ask you to queue to enter. If the queuing time is likely to be longer than 30 minutes, those who have bookings, or who are unable to wait in a queue for prolonged periods of time will be given priority." An institution that writes a 30-minute priority rule is telling you the queue reaches 30 minutes. A weekday morning avoids it.

The Storehouse was a finalist for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026 — £20,000 to each finalist, with the £120,000 going to The Box in Plymouth in July.

Hackney Wick Overground is eight minutes away, Stratford about twenty. Going west to east, this is the far end of a real day: the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, the Gilbert & George Centre off Heneage Street, then out here — and King's Cross is a straight run back across town afterwards.

Come on a Thursday. You get the late hours and the drop-in both.