Visiting (finally) the V&A Storehouse - The cabinet of curiosities is open

The cabinet of curiosities is open. Walking into the new V&A East Storehouse, my first reaction was awe at the scale of it all. From the inside, the building is striking: rows of racks stretch upwards like the shelves of a giant library, drawers slide open to reveal centuries-old textiles, and through glass walls you can watch conservators carefully repairing objects in real time. For anyone who loves museums, it feels like peeking behind the curtain. Here are 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and over 1,000 archives gathered in one place, with the doors open for all of us to wander but not everything is visible.

At first glance, the whole experience feels refreshingly honest. Labels explain the different routes an object might take into the collection: in lieu, bequest, commissioned, donated, acquired… but no mention of pieces taken during colonisation. It was good to see these pathways made visible, a sense of how the storehouse works, rather than pretending everything arrived in the same way. Conservation spaces are not tucked away but part of the visit, reminding us that collections are alive, needing care and attention. I loved the textile drawers by the cafe, centuries of fabric waiting to be pulled out and looked at. It was also clear that the museum had worked with east London communities and youth groups, the real East London people, in shaping displays and events, trying to ground this huge institution in its neighbourhood. There was even a label about decolonising museum practices, referring to the staff-led reading and learning group that began a few years ago to interrogate colonial and imperial histories. They spent two years discussing the Maqdala cup. While I appreciated seeing this effort acknowledged and the label next to Stuart Hall's book, I couldn’t help but think the framing could go further. As mentioned, the list of acquisition routes still leaves out colonisation, theft, or dispossession.

The Storehouse also offers services that flip the usual museum model on its head. The “Order an Object” option allows anyone to request something from the collection for a closer look. It’s a small but important gesture: an acknowledgement that curiosity and knowledge don’t only belong to professionals, but to the public. It suggests a museum that is trying to be more transparent, participatory, and ethical.

And yet, as I moved through the building, a tension started to surface. Racks and vitrines are fascinating at first, but after a while the repetition sets in. I found plenty of furniture (chairs, trunks, etc.) and soon caught myself drifting, imagining how they might look in a dream villa instead of thinking about their histories. There was a little costume, a little sculpture, but not much painting. Of course, some pieces need to be away for conservation reasons. But that’s when it struck me: more access doesn’t necessarily mean more meaning. If openness is only about showing us how much stuff there is, it risks becoming another spectacle.

The deeper question is about context. Are we being let into the full story of how these things came to be here? Or are we still walking through a beautifully lit cabinet of empire? The V&A’s collection is one of the largest in the world, millions of objects in total, the majority of them from outside the UK. Many items arrived through (expensive) purchases or donations, but many others came through empire, expeditions, and the concentrated wealth of Britain’s colonial past and, also, not that long ago. Fascinating, for instance, to stumble across a 15th-century Spanish ceiling, the Torrijos ceiling, and wonder: how did this end up here? Because of wealth. To this day, the museum does not publish a clear breakdown of how many objects were acquired in these ways I am mentioning. There are important research projects, yes, and some labels do acknowledge difficult histories, yes, but most of the collection remains silent on its origins.

This is where the promise of the Storehouse feels both exciting and incomplete. On one hand, the transparency is real. On the other, the bigger structural questions remain unresolved. In museum studies, this is sometimes described as the difference between “access” and “accountability.” One is about opening doors; the other is about opening books.

That is why the community work feels so important. The involvement of local youth groups, the chance for east Londoners (the real east Londoners, not just the hipsters) to shape displays and add their voices, is a step toward shifting narrative authority. Instead of curators speaking only from above, the Storehouse allows others to speak with and within the collection. But for this to go further, those voices need to influence not only what is displayed, but how histories are told. It is one thing to co-curate a case, another to co-write the story of how something was acquired and what it represents today.

Walking out, I was left with a mix of admiration and unease. Admiration because the Storehouse is generous: free to enter, welcoming in tone, easy in language, and filled with opportunities to explore objects in new ways. Unease because behind the glass walls, the same legacies remain, and transparency alone doesn’t undo them. For all its openness, this is still a national collection built from global extractions, and until those stories are consistently told, the risk is that we leave impressed by the scale rather than informed by the truth. And yes, some of the corridors were closed, which left me wanting to see more.

The Storehouse is an experiment worth celebrating. It makes visible what was invisible, it redefines what a museum visit can be, and it invites curiosity. But if it is to be more than a stylish warehouse of wonders, it also needs to commit to radical accountability. So yes, the cabinet of curiosities is open. The question is whether it can also be a cabinet of truths.