V&A East Storehouse
A walk-in working store of the V&A's collection in the Olympic Park, free to visit, where you can wander the shelves of a real museum store.
The lowdown
The V&A East Storehouse is one of the most exciting free things to open in London in years. Instead of a polished gallery, it lets you walk straight into a working museum store, with tens of thousands of objects from the V&A's vast collection sitting on open shelves across several floors, and it costs nothing to enter.
The idea flips the usual museum on its head. There are no neat themed rooms, just the glorious jumble of a real store, costumes next to ceramics next to chunks of architecture, and you are trusted to wander and discover for yourself.
Most remarkable of all, you can book to have specific objects from the wider collection brought out for you to see up close, for free. It is part museum, part backstage tour and entirely brilliant, and it sits in the fast-changing Olympic Park alongside the Young V&A nearby.
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