V&A East Storehouse in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will give public extensive access behind the scenes

It looks like the Hangar 51 store room from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark: row after row of boxes and artefacts kept in climate-controlled conditions. The V&A East Storehouse is not off limits, though. The team behind it hope 250,000 people a year will visit and gain access to archives such as its recently acquired David Bowie collection.

Delayed because of the pandemic, the storehouse, one of two new locations for the museum, will open to the public on 31 May next year in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The huge space spans four floors and is the size of 30 basketball courts, encompassing 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and nearly 1,000 archives.