The Storehouse

Yesterday I met up with blogger Sharon, who is visiting London from the sweltering desert environs of Phoenix, Arizona. Sharon had mentioned in an earlier comment on my blog that she wanted to visit the V&A East Storehouse, a vast working museum and warehouse in East London where the V&A houses many of the items in its collection. I said, "I'll go with you!" So yesterday we made it happen.

I met Sharon near Euston Station and we took the tube and then the overground train to Hackney Wick, a colorful neighborhood full of street art near the River Lea. I've been to Hackney Wick many times and you've seen it on this blog. But the Storehouse is a relatively new addition to the neighborhood, which has been dramatically built up and gentrified since the London Olympics were held there back in 2012. What was once a landscape of junkyards and industrial estates is now an Emerald City of glittering apartment buildings and hipster cafes. There's still some impressive street art here and there.

We stopped at a little coffee shop across from the museum where, curiously, they seemed to sell large dramatic houseplants as well as cappuccinos. Only after we left did we see it was called "Coffee and Plants." Well, that explains it.

We entered the Storehouse, where Sharon (like all visitors) had to put her bag into a locker before entering the storage/exhibition area. Visitors are asked at the outset not to touch the objects on the shelves, many of which are within easy range, but the mood is relaxed and there's not a lot of strict monitoring. And how do you know what you're looking at? Well, the displays on the end caps of the shelves have a number, and there's an app where you can enter that number and read about each item.

To learn about the other objects in storage, you have to be able to see the item number and enter that on a different web page. Sadly, I couldn't see the number for the pandas above, so their provenance remains a mystery.

There's a glass floor looking down into a lower gallery, not quite as terrifying as the one I stood on at Blackpool Tower. See the round black objects in the display case at top center of the photo above? Those are Keith Moon's drums, all in their protective cases. The V&A owns an incredibly eclectic collection of stuff, like Mughal architectural remnants, a medieval ceiling from Spain, British Art Nouveau ceramics and hand-tailored robes from Africa. It's fascinating that they've developed a method for simultaneously storing it all and showing it off.

Above is part of the facade of Robin Hood Gardens, an architecturally acclaimed housing estate in East London that is sadly being demolished. (I went there and blogged about it way back in 2015.) The V&A salvaged part of the building and the entrances of two apartments, so you can imagine walking along the outer corridors of the estate back in its heyday. There's also an accompanying film showing interiors and an audio track where residents explain what it was like to live there.

From the macro to the micro -- the size of objects in the V&A collection can vary vastly from gigantic architectural elements to the smallest mementos.

Here's Sharon photographing the Kaufmann Office, another architectural installation. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1935 and 1937 and made of cypress paneling, it used to be the office of Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner. Wright and his acolytes also had a presence in Arizona, at the architectural studio Taliesin West, and Sharon has blogged several of their buildings, so this was a perfect find for her!

After wandering around the Storehouse for a couple of hours we had a quick lunch in the cafe (cheese and piccalilli sandwich and coffee for me), and decided to hop on a bus and take a scenic route back to Marylebone. We caught the 30 bus from Hackney Wick and sat in the coveted front seat on the top deck, which we discovered is not so coveted on a hot sunny day. It was like being in a dehydrator -- we nearly roasted up there before we moved to a shadier seat farther back. But we had a good view!