The Victoria & Albert Museum Expands, Twice
In the past eighteen months, Britain’s venerable Victoria & Albert Museum has added two new outposts. The nation’s most important repository of applied and decorative arts, it possesses far more than its custodians can (or would want to) put on permanent display at its long-standing location, in South Kensington. For decades, hundreds of thousands of its objects were available only to scholars and curators. The museum finally decided to find a way to both store and display its excess holdings, and the inspired result, the Storehouse, opened in East London in May, 2025. Designed by the architectural studio of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it is a coolly contemporary solution to the puzzle of an inordinate collection: warehouse meets Wunderkammer. Then, this past April, another building, the V. & A. East, opened, with an inviting anthropological focus: Why are humans so driven to make things? In our age of A.I. slop, the V. & A.’s devotion to physical objects is a tonic. And if two new buildings seem like overkill, think of all those data centers.
The Storehouse is gargantuan, extending over four airy, interconnected levels and containing a quarter of a million objects. Visitors explore vast corridors of metal racks filled with bentwood chairs, bicycles, and beyond. Objects on display range from the very small—a Palladian-style, mahogany doll’s house from the seventeen-twenties—to the very large. A darkened galley is dedicated to examples from the museum’s collection of stage cloths; it currently hosts a design by Natalia Goncharova for a 1926 Ballets Russes production of “The Firebird.” Measuring more than thirty feet by fifty feet, the cloth invites a jeté from more agile museumgoers. Visiting the Storehouse is like browsing an IKEA filled with irreplaceable items. Instead of Sektion kitchen cabinets, there’s the Frankfurt Kitchen, a model of modernist efficiency designed, in the nineteen-twenties, by the architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and retrieved from an apartment in Frankfurt. Instead of Billy bookcases, there’s a gorgeous office—a symphony of cypress surfaces—that Frank Lloyd Wright created for a department-store mogul.
Visitors can’t touch the Wright office—there are limits to accessibility—but they can reserve delicate items from the archive in advance and examine them in a study area. A fashion enthusiast, say, can summon a Balenciaga dress from 1954 or an eighteenth-century mantua gown with a skirt as wide as an automobile. The building’s size has accommodated the installation of large-scale architectural holdings, including a three-story section of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, an influential brutalist public-housing project in East London. (Completed in 1972, it was recently demolished.) Visitors can walk along a reconstruction of what the building’s architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, characterized as a “street in the sky”—a covered walkway. An accompanying recording of residents’ voices attests to the sense of community that the design fostered.
The V. & A. East, playfully designed by the Irish firm O’Donnell + Tuomey, resembles a billowing concrete skirt. Its programming draws from the surrounding borough of Newham, which is one of London’s most vibrant and diverse districts, with more than a hundred different languages spoken among its residents. A visitor entering the two permanent Why We Make galleries is immersed in a buzzy sense of generative energy and self-expression. One eye-catching display is dedicated to the work of Ron Hitchins, a self-taught artist from East London who, in the late twentieth century, adorned his home with tiles carved in abstract relief patterns of his own devising. Nearby is a ballet costume, from 1987, inspired by the night-club garb of the performance artist Leigh Bowery. The ensemble includes a fabric mask covered in elaborate appliqué crewelwork and a codpiece bedazzled with pink sequins. This kind of cross-pollination—bondage wear combined with eighteenth-century pastoral—will surely inspire students at the neighboring London College of Fashion.
Visitors move from one thrilling juxtaposition to the next. A patchwork quilt made by inmates at Wandsworth Prison, in southwest London, features an embroidered fingerprint flanked by strands of coiled DNA and the words “I didn’t do it Guv!! Honest!” A sampler embroidered around 1830 by Elizabeth Parker, a seventeen-year-old servant, takes the convention’s form—to demonstrate the fineness of a practitioner’s needlework—and turns it into a gripping narrative of abuse by her employer. In neat red stitches, Parker explains that “for trying to avoid the wicked design of my master I was thrown down stairs.” Nearby is a talismanic shirt inscribed with the entire text of the Quran. The shirt, likely made in India around five hundred years ago, was intended to protect its wearer in battle—or in childbirth. I didn’t expect a museum of craft and design to move me so, but I found myself on the brink of tears, struck by the palpable humanity of those who had made, and worn, such works. The armpits of the Quran shirt are stained with centuries-old sweat.
The V. & A., founded in 1852, has tears aplenty in its history. Much of its collection is a product of imperial extraction. In the eighteen-eighties, it absorbed twenty thousand objects from the former India Museum, which was founded by the East India Company. This notorious commercial entity, a precursor of the global corporations of today and big enough to command its own army, ruthlessly exploited foreign resources, human and material. One of the most celebrated objects from the India Museum is a mechanical wooden sculpture of a ferocious tiger gnawing at a British soldier’s throat. It was stolen from the palace of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, after he was killed in an assault by British forces in 1799.
Reckoning with the bloody history of global conquest has become a task for all museums whose collections are legacies of colonial control. But Tristram Hunt, the V. & A.’s director, has noted that it is “impossible and ahistorical to seek to ‘decolonise’ a museum like the V. & A., given its foundational connection to the history of British imperialism.” Instead, Hunt has argued, the V. & A. museums explicitly seek to represent a version of British culture that incorporates the historical fact of empire—rather than simply repudiating it, as some on the left might wish, or celebrating it, as some on the right might do. One years-long project is attempting to recover where, and by whom, the India Museum’s objects were made, thus conjuring “the world they inhabited before they were obscured by empire,” as Hunt has written.
After all, this history is constitutive of current British culture. Among the U.K. residents who visit these museums, there will be some who go see relatives in Mysore every year; others will be descendants of people employed by the East India Company. It has become commonplace to speak of multicultural societies like Britain, and cities like London, as being mosaics in which many fragments cohere into a gorgeous whole, or tapestries woven of varied threads. These metaphors take on fresh force at a museum whose collection contains so many mosaics and so many textiles, and which is increasingly dedicated to uncovering the personal stories of their makers.
This is especially true when the skilled fashionings of the human hand—not to mention the cogitations of the human mind—are being displaced by digital simulacra. One of the Why We Make galleries features a remarkable work called “Anatomy of an AI System,” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. Created in 2018, it maps myriad manufacturing processes underlying the Amazon Echo, from the mining of rare-earth metals to the pollutant-producing manufacture of components and the laying of submarine cable. A handy sidebar shows the monthly remuneration of people involved in the Echo’s making, from a C.E.O. towering at the top to a Congolese miner at the bottom. The entire piece is, appropriately enough, too big to take in in one glance; a viewer must step from side to side, and peer and squint, to make any sense of it. The sun has long since set on the British Empire, but, as this work reminds us, it has not set on practices of rapacious exploitation. The rest of the museum’s collection underscores the precious value of taking matters, and materials, into our own hands. ♦