This really is pretty major for the area. Today, the V&A announced it has secured the archive of iconic musician David Bowie for its new V&A Storehouse in Here East – just a short walk across the Olympic Park from Leyton. And, handily, next to awesome coffee merchants Saint Espresso, too.
From 2025, the archive will be made available to the public through the creation of The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts. Encompassing more than 80,000 items, the archive traces Bowie’s creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon, and advocate for self-expression and reinvention from his early career in the 1960s to his death in 2016. Alongside the creation of the new centre will be ongoing conservation, research, and study of the archive.
Spanning Bowie’s career, the archive features handwritten lyrics, letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments, album artwork and awards. It also includes more intimate writings, thought processes and unrealised projects, the majority of which have never been seen in public before.
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Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti (1972), Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973, pictured below) and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover (1997). The archive also includes handwritten lyrics for songs including Fame (1975), “Heroes” (1977) and Ashes to Ashes (1980), as well as examples of the “cut up” method of writing introduced to Bowie by the writer William Burroughs. Additionally, the archive holds a series of intimate notebooks from every era of Bowie’s life and career.
The archive also includes a photo collage of film stills from The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975-76), directed by Nicolas Roeg and featuring Bowie, and over 70,000 photographs, prints, negatives, large format transparencies, slides and contact sheets taken by some of the 20th century’s leading photographers from Terry O’Neill to Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton. Among other highlights are instruments, amps, and other equipment, including Brian Eno’s EMS Synthesizer from Bowie’s seminal Low (1977) and “Heroes” albums and a Stylophone – a gift from Marc Bolan in the late 1960’s, used on Bowie’s seminal Space Oddity recording.
Housed at Here East on the canalside, V&A East Storehouse will be a new type of museum experience designed within and around the V&A’s stored collections. Taking visitors behind the scenes, it will enable unprecedented access in a new purpose-built home for over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives.
V&A East Storehouse brings together conservation labs, working stores, research and reading rooms with galleries, display and performance spaces and creative studios – through an extensive public network centred around the Collections Hall. The acquisition follows the V&A’s ground-breaking 2013 exhibition, David Bowie Is…, which was seen by over two million people, one of the V&A’s most popular exhibitions of all time.
Main image: David Bowie as The Thin White Duke, Station to Station Tour, 1976 © John Robert Rowlands
Find out more about V&A East @vam_east or online and here.
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