Queen Elizabeth Park

V&A’s new museum is a defiant stand against the vandals

From our UK edition

In last week’s Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to ‘get these works out’. There’s an alternative solution: bring the public in. V&A East Storehouse, which opened last weekend, was designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro to do just that. The museum’s collections were previously holed up in the creaking, late-Victorian Blythe House. The government decided to sell it in 2015, leading the V&A to find a new home in the Olympics’s former Broadcasting Centre in Hackney Wick, a big box since rebadged as Here East, an ‘innovation campus’. The Storehouse’s entrance indeed blends in with the startups and students sharing the building.