Sure, the new £65m V&A East Storehouse is, it’s as impressive as everyone is saying. But the best thing for locals? It’s free to visit, an easy weekend jaunt over to Here East. It’s also the biggest of 2025’s trio of arts arrivals in our part of East London: the other two, lest you’ve forgotten, are Sadler’s Wells East and Soho Theatre Walthamstow.
For the uninitiated, Storehouse is the first half of the new V&A East. While the second part, the Museum proper, opens on Stratford’s East Bank in spring 2026, this vast storage solution — spectacularly designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects behind NYC’s High Line — is bigger than thirty basketball courts and crammed with over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives.
With items spanning every creative discipline, from Roman frescos to the Glastonbury Festival Archive, just 3% of the collection is visible at any one time: a hundred mini curated displays are hacked into the ends and sides of the storage racking. The other 97% can be glimpsed through cracks and gaps. You can follow your nose and find your own path through what is essentially a behind-the-scenes museum experience.
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Climbing up the entrance stairs to the central hall, the atrium appears to stretch to infinity — a rush of the sublime that will provoke a gasp. Juxtaposition is what gives the collection power: artefacts dizzyingly cheek-to-jowl include oil paintings, posters, busts, musical instruments, statues, clothing, historic fragments, furniture, textiles, pottery, old magazines and so much more. A glass floor allows a vertiginous glimpse of the basement: I found myself treading on it as tentatively as a ballet dancer.
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Despite the emphasis on individual experiences, there are key pieces worth discovering, including the late 15th-century ornate carved gilded ceiling from a palace in Torrijos, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufman office, and the imposing installation of Poplar’s defunct Robin Hood Gardens estate. Meanwhile, new works and commissions with young East Londoners from Waltham Forest, Hackney and Newham include chairs created by students who worked with makers from Blackhorse Workshop in Walthamstow.
You’ll undoubtedly now have heard about the “world-first” Order An Object experience, where anyone can book to see any object they like, seven-days a week: apparently, this is already a smash. And should you exhaust this vast repository over the summer, the on-site David Bowie Centre is next to open on September 12th.
But for now, join the queue for a butcher’s at this mind-blowing cultural lab on our doorstep. It opens 10am-6pm, then seven-days-a-week, with late nights every Thursday and Saturday to 10pm. @vam_east
And what do we eat there?
Another fact: the original South Kensington V&A is not only the biggest museum of its kind in the world (housing 2.8 million objects), it was the first to be built with an onsite “refreshment room”. Thus the pressure is on for Storehouse to maintain its pioneering status.
Fortunately it does. Why? Because they’ve roped in E5 Bakehouse, one of London’s first independent sourdough bakeries founded back in 2011, to fill the corner cafe site. A spacious yet simple industrial-style space, with close-knit tables and a sofa or two, there’s even a window counter long enough to perch with coffee and laptop, should you need some arty weekday inspo.
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As you’d expect, the menu majors in pastries, chocolate rye cookies, vegan babka, cheddar Marmite buns, carrot cake and lemon drizzle, while beans are roasted at its Poplar Bakehouse. I can also recommend the sandwiches, especially the tangy sourdough with robust Lincolnshire poacher, seasonal leaves and mustard, and a zingy vegan caponata on focaccia. For a sweet-savoury hit, the sourdough pain au chocolat is a substantial thing of beauty: so good, I nearly ordered another.
Other menu highlights? Roast chicken and lemon aioli baguettes, breakfast buns with frittata and cherry tomatoes, and fattoush salad with grilled vegetables, pitta crisps, olive and feta. And yes, there’s one must-try: a regularly changing seasonal tart, which this month is a salted caramel nut creation, filled with pistachios, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts and pecans.
In short, after all those carbs, I was more than thankful for that 30-minute walk home afterwards. @e5bakehouse, @vam_east
This is a much shorter version of the full story first published last month on Substack. To read it and loads more like it, delivered every week to your inbox, and long before the stories appear online here, please subscribe to the newsletter. In doing so you help to sustain Leytonstoner’s existence. Only one in ten stories is now published on this site and every story we publish goes on the newsletter first here.
