“It wasn’t that difficult to convince people to lend us objects because it’s the V&A,” curator Jacqueline Springer tells me as we stand in the brand-new V&A East Museum. After all, folks’s willingness to mortgage—and even donate—private objects has made the V&A one among the most influential collections in the world.
Now, London’s most enjoyable new museum in latest reminiscence has lastly opened. It’s the newest V&A area in the capital, a part of a lineage that started with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in 1857 as the South Kensington Museum. Since then, the V&A’s assortment has expanded into one thing many administrators may solely dream of, with artifacts spanning centuries on rotation behind glowing cupboards. Naturally, a plethora of treasures requires sufficient area. The opening of the East London website comes after latest and appreciable expansions: Young V&A in Bethnal Green, the just-opened V&A Storehouse, and the V&A Dundee in Scotland.
V&A East contains two everlasting areas: the V&A Storehouse, which opened in 2025, and the V&A East Museum, which opens on April 18, 2026. The Storehouse permits guests to request to view its lots of artifacts. The V&A East Museum will home everlasting collections and momentary exhibitions.
“What we wanted to do was to make this about people,” Gus Casely-Hayford, the V&A East’s director, tells me. “When I came into my role, it was exactly at the time that the pandemic began. We built a team, an idea, and a vision through remote work. And part of that was informed by the period when we wanted to invest in building connectivity and in creating an institution that could emotionally connect with the communities we serve. As soon as we were able, we got out there to see those communities, to talk to them, to ask them what it was that they would want in a V&A East Museum.”
The area people was completely satisfied to oblige, says Casely-Hayford. He remembers zipping between native colleges round the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to talk in assemblies, interact with smaller teams in school rooms, and uncover what V&A East needed to provide the native residents and past. He recounts younger folks’s aspirations to work in inventive areas, which had been giving option to frustration attributable to restricted alternatives, every not sure break into what’s more and more seen as an elitist business.
On the second flooring, I meet Springer, the V&A’s curator of Africa and Diaspora: Performance, whose background spans journalism, academia, and occasion curation. I’m taken on a whistle-stop tour of The Music is Black: A British Story, an exhibition 4 years in the making that explores 125 years of Black music in Britain. In hushed tones, she explains that the exhibition is organized into 4 sections, likened to vertebrae. “The first establishes the vertebrae for the entire project,” she says, guiding me by means of.