The new V&A East Museum is a bold addition to Stratford
If the purpose of art is to provoke a reaction, the V&A East Museum manages that feat before you’ve even stepped across its threshold. Design studio O’Donnell + Tuomey’s £135m creation is a mad-looking thing, an impossible collection of angles and aspects, animalesque, squatting on its haunches beside Sadler’s Wells and overlooking West Ham’s London Stadium.
The design of the new V&A East Museum
With its criss-cross of triangles – it’s made up of 479 giant concrete panels – it toys with your sense of perspective, seeming to shift as you approach. It’s the kind of building I could have an argument with myself about, a sort of Schroedinger’s architecture that I love and loathe at the same time.
The design language continues inside, where the aesthetic is closer to the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik building than it is to the original V&A. Concrete and terrazzo and bare wood are the materials of choice in this resolutely minimalist space. Its twisty staircases, which narrow or widen as you ascend its four storeys, culminate in a terrace overlooking Queen Elizabeth Park and the London skyline. Everywhere you look, triangular windows capture intriguing perspectives of the area: from one you might find a view of a raised walkway full of people milling to and from Westfield, from another a grim looking sliver of post-industrial wasteland. This is Stratford, alright.
Who is the new V&A East for?
It certainly feels different from London’s other gallery spaces, and this was a key part of the brief. Dreamed up during the pandemic, the V&A East is aimed at the gallery goers of tomorrow, not children (they already have the Young V&A) but teenagers and young adults, especially those from around East London who haven’t grown up with cultural institutions on their doorsteps.
“We don’t just want this to be a place they come with their classmates on a school trip,” says V&A East director Gus Casely-Hayford. “We want it to be somewhere they want to come on their own. I hope people fall in love with this space, that it becomes a place of refuge and reflection. You see so many young people at Westfield: we want to find a way of creating a civic museum that holds that same kind of draw.”
He says he visited hundreds of schools, speaking to thousands of students, to try and work out how to best serve this tricky demographic, and that the museum’s first major exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story, was directly inspired by these conversations.
The new permanent collection
First, though, to the permanent collection, entitled Why We Make. Curating a permanent display is an impossible job, really. It’s a highlight reel of a museum’s interests, a snapshot of what it stands for and a sales pitch for its paid-for exhibitions. And when that museum has well over two million objects in its collection, where do you even begin? And as Brendan Cormier, V&A East’s chief curator, acknowledged, the V&A is even more eclectic than your average museum.
So a wall of graphic printed posters lurks beside a display case of traditional Asian fabrics, which are neighbours with some modernist chairs. There’s a little shrine to William Morris and a tiny replica of the stage from Shelagh Delaney play A Taste of Honey and an absurdly voluminous dress by East London fashion designer Molly Goddard. It’s kind of like scrolling an exceptionally curated Instagram feed, each object beautiful in its own right but disconnected from its siblings.
There are also some lovely presentational touches: captions that talk to you as you approach and interactive screens and incredibly comfy sofas on which to recline. There is a vague running theme about the democratisation of art and the importance of artists in shaping a better future (the inclusion of Extinction Rebellion flags are sure to trigger writers from The Telegraph) but for the most part you can just luxuriate in the pretty things, which is what the flagship V&A has always excelled in.
The Music is Black review
The first temporary exhibition, meanwhile, is a real triumph. The Music is Black draws on the V&A’s immense collection to tell the story of black British music from the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through to the modern day. Furnished with headphones that react to the various exhibits, the music of people from the African diaspora follows you from room to room: the drums and string instruments of tribal West Africans, the sounds of Bob Marley and the Wailers, the decks of modern DJs.
While it doesn’t shy away from the horrors and hardships faced by black communities, it’s also joyous, a celebration of the people who invented popular music as we know it. As is so often the case with the V&A, the costumes are the real stars here, whether it’s the leather ensemble worn by Seal or the neon yellow suit emblazoned with the words Clit Rock worn by Skunk Anansie’s Skin.
If this is the quality we can expect from this new museum, I expect I will be back here often.
• For more information on the V&A East Museum visit the website here