“It wasn’t that difficult to convince people to lend us objects because it’s the V&A,” curator Jacqueline Springer tells me as we stand inside the new V&A East Museum. The institution’s reputation makes people willing to loan—and often donate—personal and historic pieces, helping build one of the world’s most influential collections.
The V&A East is the capital’s newest major museum and the latest extension of a lineage that began with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in 1857 as the South Kensington Museum. Over the decades the V&A has expanded: recent additions include the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, the V&A Storehouse, and V&A Dundee in Scotland. V&A East comprises two permanent sites: the Storehouse, which opened in 2025 and allows visitors to request objects for viewing, and the V&A East Museum, opening April 18, 2026, which will present both permanent displays and rotating exhibitions.
Gus Casely-Hayford, director of V&A East, emphasizes community as the guiding principle. “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,” he says. The team then engaged directly with local communities around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park—speaking at schools, meeting small groups, asking what local people wanted from a museum. The responses included a clear desire among young people for creative opportunities and pathways into industries they often perceived as elitist and inaccessible.
Springer, the curator of Africa and Diaspora: Performance, guided me through one of the museum’s headline shows: The Music Is Black: A British Story. Four years in the making, the exhibition traces 125 years of Black music in Britain and is organized into four linked sections Springer likens to vertebrae. The displays prompt questions about history and context—for example, a King James Bible placed beside a so-called “Slave Bible.” The latter, published the same year the British slave trade was outlawed, omits passages like Moses leading the enslaved to freedom, raising difficult questions about how texts were used to control and justify.
Music soundtracks accompany each section: the choral strains of “Miserere mei, Deus” give way to gospel chants and hymns like “Amazing Grace,” then to ska, reggae, funk, garage, grime, and more contemporary sounds. Millie Small’s 1964 hit “My Boy Lollipop” greets visitors in one space; nearby sits the carved piano of Winifred Atwell, the Trinidad-born pianist who was the first Black British artist to top the UK singles chart in 1954. Fans used to carve their names into her piano; beneath a glossy finish I spot an inscription reading “Arthur and Bette” dated 1961.
Object highlights continue through the exhibition: stage costumes worn by Seal, Billy Ocean, and Betty Boo; the gown Shirley Bassey wore to the 85th Academy Awards in 2013; the synthesizer Paul Hardcastle used to remix “19”; and the Banksy-designed vest Stormzy wore when headlining Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. Together these items create a musical and cultural throughline from early diasporic faith traditions to the multi-genre British music scene of today.
Below The Music Is Black are two permanent, free-to-access gallery spaces titled Why We Make, a curated exploration of creativity across art, politics, and culture. The displays are eclectic: teapots and a repaired bowl from 1880–1920 showing traditional metal fastening, Molly Goddard dresses, portraits of East Londoners, Xinyu Weng’s Upcycling Shared Bicycles project, and Extinction Rebellion pamphlets. While one visitor calls the galleries “too encyclopedic,” many of the objects together argue for a continuing human impulse to create—an idea that feels urgent amid growing reliance on technology and AI.
On the lower ground café—run by Jikoni co-founders Ravinder Bhogal and Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany—I catch up with chief curator Brendan Cormier. Asked about the main takeaway for visitors, he says, “I think the main takeaway is that there are universal narratives about design that have inspired people from 5,000 years ago to today. To engage in that design is for everyone.”
V&A East’s approach is built on accessibility and local engagement: free admission to the permanent galleries, community-informed programming, and a mix of high-profile temporary shows and wide-ranging permanent displays intended to invite broad participation. The museum’s opening marks a significant cultural addition to East London and the wider V&A family.
V&A East Museum opens April 18, 2026. Admission to the permanent displays is free; some exhibitions and events may carry separate charges.
