At London’s New Design Museum, Visitors Get Hands-On Access
Part warehouse, part library, the V&A East Storehouse Museum allows attendees to personally inspect armor, instruments and other artifacts from a 250,000-object collection.
At V&A East Storehouse, visitors can peer down into the workshops of conservators.
Photographer: Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images
A new museum opens in London this weekend that offers visitors a highly unusual experience among collections globally: the chance to request and view unique and priceless objects one-on-one.
The museum in question is V&A East Storehouse, a tall, spacious warehouse that gives the public unprecedented access to over 250,000 artifacts not usually on display from the collection of West London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain’s national museum for the applied arts. While most of the remarkable collection — which includes items as eclectic as medieval horse armor, musical instruments and an original Frankfurt Kitchen — is displayed in glass storage cases, members of the public will also be able to get up close and personal by requesting to view a specific object in one of the storehouse’s dedicated viewing spaces. The result could prove to be one of the most accessible museum set-ups in the world.