V&A Order an Object
The V&A East Storehouse turns one year old today and to celebrate it’s first birthday I decided to visit and ignore almost everything it had to show me. Was I being selfish? Yes, and that’s exactly the journey they wanted me to have, because I was trying out the highly personal Order an Object experience.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Storehouse I should first point out that it is not the recently opened V&A East Museum, located directly across from the Olympic London Stadium. The Storehouse is the V&A’s working warehouse & restoration facility that houses over 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and 1,000 archives. Those stats are important because everything, within reason, is available for you to see. So what’s the catch? You’re pretty much on your own.
Wandering the Storehouse is a lot like walking through IKEA: endless aisles of quadruple level racks filled with stuff you don’t need and couldn’t get down without a forklift even if you did. Expect to spend a lot of your time gawping and muttering “what the heck is that?” because there’s barely any labels, which can make visits a bit frustrating because you can only get so much mileage out of looking at things from a short distance without knowing what they are. The ‘peek behind the scenes’ warehouse experience is certainly a novelty, though I’m not sure how many repeat visits it warrants. Hopefully they will actively change up the small selection of curated displays that contain helpful descriptions, but as I mentioned, those weren’t what brought me to the venue.
I was there for the Order an Object experience and signing up is just as easy as buying groceries online. You simply browse the online shop, put up to five items in your basket, pick a time-slot and when you arrive a member of the Collections Access Team will bring you to your table and show you how to interact with the objects safely. My five objects were patiently waiting when I arrived, and many of my readers will be unsurprised to know that everything I ordered had a penguin on it: a Circus Poster, a Concert Poster, a Concert Promotional Board, an Embroidery Sampler and a swatch of Furnishing Fabric. I had also assumed my items would come with a chaperone but after a brief introduction about how to carefully handle the items they left me to it.
You really are left alone. There’s plenty of staff buzzing about the room should have any questions or need any help but I soon realised I was more than happy to be able to move around, hold, turn over and otherwise carefully study historical objects the way I wanted to, with my own hands. While wearing purple latex gloves, of course. I turned over the posters and studied the backs, seeing where ink had begun to seep through half-century old paper or spotting remnants of tape that had once been used to affix it to someone’s wall. I picked up and felt the delicacy of the embroidery sampler, and carefully moved the frayed edges hanging from the furnishing fabric.
At one point I discovered what looked like a small bug. I initially thought it might have been a wayward linseed that had fallen off my morning toast and travelled with me until it landed on the poster I was looking at. Whatever it was, it was stuck, so I alerted one of the team who very carefully picked it off and put it in a plastic bag they labelled like they were a crime scene forensics investigator. The care and focus the man gave to the matter was fascinating to watch, but when I asked someone else for some basic info about the items I had reserved they politely referred me to their website. It all made sense once I’d understood that the team that supports Order an Object are conservators, not the research department.
Top Tip: before you go, pre-load the info pages of each object you reserved on your phone so you can easily refer to them during your visit. When you arrive all you get is the object(s).
If there are objects in the collection that align with your passion(s) or you happen to be researching something then Order an Object is an absolutely brilliant experience that I highly recommend. But if you’re just idly curious about the service, or hoping to get a quick glimpse of an object that’s not currently on display (of which there are many) then I encourage you to think twice about why you’re going, or what length session you reserve. It takes time and effort and a lot of care for the collections team to extract your order and ensure it’s ready for your visit. It’s a waste of everyone’s time if you show up, spend five minutes and then split.
Interacting with something, actually holding a historical artefact in your hands, fundamentally alters your experience and engagement with that item. And be honest, even though it’s not allowed, how many times have you really, really wanted to touch something in a museum? The Order an Object experience let’s you do just that, and it might be one of the most amazing museum experiences you’ll ever have.
Plan your visit
The V&A East Storehouse is located at Parkes Street, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, E20 3AX
Approx. 8 minute walk from Hackney Wick station, and approx. 20 min walk from Stratford station.
Admission is FREE. Please check website for opening days/times.
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‘Order an Object’ is a FREE and ongoing experience.
Visit the Order an Object page for more info about the process and to reserve items to review in person.
Visit the V&A East Storehouse page and follow @vamuseum on Instagram for more info about the venue.
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