“It wasn’t that difficult to convince people to lend us objects because it’s the V&A,” curator Jacqueline Springer says as we stand inside the new V&A East. The museum’s reputation, she explains, makes owners and institutions willing to loan or even donate personal and historic items, helping to assemble a collection with real reach and resonance.
V&A East is the latest major addition to the V&A family, whose roots date back to the Victoria and Albert Museum, opened as the South Kensington Museum in 1857. The V&A has expanded in recent years to include the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, the V&A Storehouse, and V&A Dundee in Scotland. V&A East operates across two permanent sites: the Storehouse, which opened in 2025 and lets visitors request objects for viewing, and the V&A East Museum, which opens to the public on April 18, 2026 and will host both permanent displays and rotating exhibitions.
Gus Casely-Hayford, director of V&A East, stresses that community was the starting point for the project. “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 moved into conversations with neighbourhood groups around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park—talking in schools, meeting small community cohorts, and asking directly what people wanted from a museum. Young visitors in particular asked for creative opportunities and clearer pathways into industries they saw as elitist or inaccessible.
Springer, who curated the headline exhibition Africa and Diaspora: Performance, guided me through The Music Is Black: A British Story. Four years in the making, the show traces roughly 125 years of Black music in Britain across four interconnected sections that Springer likens to vertebrae. The displays are designed to provoke questions about power, history and context: a King James Bible sits beside a so-called “Slave Bible,” the latter published in the year the British slave trade was outlawed and censored to remove passages such as Moses leading the enslaved to freedom—a stark example of how texts were manipulated to control narratives.
Each section carries its own soundtrack. Choral strains of “Miserere mei, Deus” give way to gospel chants and hymns like “Amazing Grace,” then to ska and reggae, to funk and garage, into grime and contemporary sounds. Millie Small’s 1964 hit “My Boy Lollipop” greets visitors in one room; nearby is 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 once carved their names into her piano; beneath the lacquer I noticed an inscription reading “Arthur and Bette, 1961.”
Other highlights stitch together a cultural throughline: stage costumes 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 he headlined Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. Together these objects map a history from diasporic faith traditions to the multi-genre British music scene of today.
Below the music exhibition are two permanent, free-to-access galleries titled Why We Make, which survey creativity across art, politics and everyday life. The displays are eclectic by design: teapots sit alongside a repaired bowl from 1880–1920 that shows traditional metal fastening techniques; Molly Goddard dresses hang near portraits of East Londoners; Xinyu Weng’s Upcycling Shared Bicycles project appears beside Extinction Rebellion pamphlets. One visitor described the galleries as “too encyclopedic,” yet the variety of objects argues for a persistent human impulse to make and mend—an argument that feels urgent in an era of growing reliance on technology and AI.
In the lower-ground café—run by Jikoni co-founders Ravinder Bhogal and Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany—I spoke with chief curator Brendan Cormier. Asked what he hopes visitors will take away, he said: “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 programme is built on accessibility and local engagement: free entry to the permanent galleries, community-shaped programming, and a balance of headline temporary shows and broad permanent displays meant to welcome many kinds of visitors. Its opening on April 18, 2026 marks a major cultural addition to East London and an expansion of the wider V&A family. Admission to the permanent displays is free; some special exhibitions and events may carry separate charges.