What's inside Britain’s national collection of 'prized clutter'?
The Victoria & Albert’s brand-new East London storage facility is being dubbed the ‘Museum of Absolutely Everything’.
Visitors can see Keith Moon’s drum kit, a child’s rocking horse, a Vivienne Westwood gown, a slice of a ‘70s housing estate, or the David Bowie archive.
In a radical rethink of public storage, they’ve designed a gigantic storehouse in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to be fully open to the public.
The V&A holds over 4.5 million objects.
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The head of collections access is Nyssa Mildwaters who before April 2023 was conservation manager at Otago Museum for eight years.
The response has been “phenomenal”, she told RNZ’s Culture 101.
“What's been so beautiful is we've had such a mix of visitors. We've got every different kind of demographic.
"We've got young people coming in friend groups. We've got people bringing their young children in. We've got the older audiences, and everyone is just really engaging with the new approach we've taken.”
The new V&A East Storehouse opened on 31 May and allows the public to wander miles of shelves over multiple levels – getting up close to the various treasures. It's also a busy working space for museum staff.
“We've tried to remove as much barriers and glass between the objects and our visitors as possible, in the self-guided spaces, in the store, which means people have been able to get within a couple of centimetres of the most beautiful Picasso theatre backcloth, a whole range of other objects, and people have just seemed to really take to it and it's just beautiful seeing it prompting so many conversations between people which is really what we want.”
The warehouse-type space is designed to give unprecedented access to the V&A.
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The store is in the heart of East London, and the community there were involved in shaping the project, she says.
"The V&A's really worked hard to make sure we don't just come and plonk ourselves there”
Visitors can enjoy an eclectic collection, she says.
“It's real mix but that's the real beauty, you can look in the store and you can see a washing machine in the same view that you can see a part of the Agra Colonnade which is one of our large objects.”
In what is believed to be a world first there is also an online Order an Object service. Anyone can make an appointment to view, for free, up to five items from the collection, seven days a week, 363 days of the year.
The spectacular 15th-century gilded wooden ceiling from the now-lost Torrijos Palace in Toledo, Spain.
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“If you want to bring art supplies to paint or to draw let us know and we will make that happen, we've really changed the approach from people having to justify why they want to see objects, to going to a default of course you can see the objects, it's a national collection it belongs to everyone.”
Access should be “safe, easy, meaningful and equitable,” she says.
The storehouse has been designed by the firm behind New York’s High Line Park: Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
The Frankfurt Kitchen part of the V&A collection.
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