Bowie objects among most searched for at V&A East Storehouse
- 24 hours ago
- 3 min read
How can museums engage with their audiences more effectively? How can local communities reflect their own experiences and voice in cultural attractions?
These were questions that Future Cities Forum asked Tim Reeve, Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer, V&A Museums, at our Tower of London 'Cultural Cities' discussion event.
The Tower of London is currently working to enlarge its visitor base and make it more diverse through the co-curation of exhibitions and educational facilities and programmes. It has managed to develop digital infrastructure despite grappling with heritage restrictions while tapping into valuable sustainable features such as heat pumps to ensure the site's future. The V&A has been able to start almost from scratch with new buildings or adaptive re-use.
Nevertheless, it has taken over ten years for the V&A to design and build its latest museum in Stratford, east London, standing as a cornerstone of a new cultural district including the BBC Music Studios and Saddler's Wells, on the site of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The V&A East Museum has just opened and features 500 objects from its collections from global art to design, performance and fashion. The V&A says its latest museum 'celebrates making and creativity’s power to bring change. Created with young people and rooted in east London’s heritage, V&A East Museum explores what’s shaping our world with the voices that lead contemporary culture.'
Close by, the V&A East Storehouse which opened first is designed to get visitors closer to objects held in the V&A collections, and to the work of the museum. The central Weston Collections Hall is spread across three floors, reaching a height of over 20 metres. Each level is designed with public walkways with a metal grid floor and glass balustrades.
Tim described the building:
'It is very industrial with no gilding, essentially an adaptive re-use project. It is free and self-guided enabling visitors to see everything at the V&A which is normally 'behind the curtain'. You can view how colleagues work and order objects but we want visitors to almost feel that they are trespassing.'
Tim was asked whether the V&A had been surprised by the choice of objects that the public had asked to see?
'There are 3,000 objects that normally are the preserve of researchers and the public can order up five objects at a time as easily as booking a restaurant table or squash court. Not surprisingly the top ten most ordered objects are entirely David Bowie, but everything else is also exciting to see and we put the general public in charge of the selection. Recently we had someone from Newham who ordered up five wedding dresses because she was looking for inspiration for her own.
'We are very determined about the democratisation of museum practice, which is normally quite difficult to get into and the Storehouse tries to even that out.'
Another new direction for the museum in east London has been the co-curation with young people. Tim said:
'What we tried hard to do was move co-curation into a process of inviting them to help us make decisions. They are invited in as groups of twenty and we pay them for their time. They have made decisions on things like who was to run the cafe, they worked on the colour scheme for the wayfinding, I can't think of anything they haven't helped us with.
'They have been genuinely involved in the process and the impact you get from this is enormous. The aim is for people from east London to see themselves in Storehouse. The decisions they have made would not have been made by us and they are therefore so much more powerful.
'They also need to see themselves in ongoing programming and this is how their voices are continually recorded. It is about makers at Storehouse and their input is essential to what we do. It is the life blood and its what it is for.'
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