“It wasn’t that difficult to convince people to lend us objects because it’s the V&A,” says curator Jacqueline Springer as we stand in the brand-new V&A East Museum. After all, people’s willingness to loan, and even donate, personal objects has made the V&A one of the most influential museum collections in the world. Now, London’s most exciting new museum in recent memory has finally opened.
It’s the latest V&A space in the capital, part of a lineage that began with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in 1857 as the South Kensington Museum. Since then, the V&A’s collection has expanded into something many directors could only dream of, with artefacts spanning centuries and continents on rotation behind sparkling cabinets. Naturally, a plethora of treasures requires adequate space. The opening of the East London site follows on from recent and considerable expansion: Young V&A in Bethnal Green, the just-opened V&A Storehouse (sharing the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park location with V&A East Museum), and the V&A Dundee in Scotland.
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In E20, V&A East comprises two permanent spaces: the V&A Storehouse, which opened in 2025, and the V&A East Museum, which opens on 18 April 2026. The Storehouse allows visitors to request to view its masses of artefacts. The V&A East Museum will house permanent collections and temporary 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.”
