Oh! You pretty things

Displaying around 90,000 items from the Beckenham boy's personal archive, the David Bowie Centre is a thrilling glimpse into the life of a creative giant

- By Mark Hudson

That David Bowie is one of the most influential artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries goes without saying – and that’s in the Tate Modern as much as the Billboard Hot 100 sense. Even the most mainstream music lover will concede that there’s vastly

★★★★★

V&A East Storehouse, London

That David Bowie is one of the most influential artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries goes without saying – and that’s in the Tate Modern as much as the Billboard Hot 100 sense. Even the most mainstream music lover will concede that there’s vastly more to the boy from Beckenham than the sum of his greatest hits and even the extraordinary get-ups in which he brought fictional alter-egos such as Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke before the world.

Yet pinning down the nature of Bowie's influence isn't so easy. Nearly 10 years on from his death, he still feels palpably present in our culture, flitting between mediums and meanings like some amphetamined butterfly, barely contained in one conceptual frame before he appears in a subtly, or sometimes radically different form elsewhere. Now the V&A, whose hugely popular 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is was pivotal in establishing his image as a compulsive, intellectually ravenous autodidact, is providing the opportunity for an even deeper and more intimate dive into the Bowie legacy.

The opening of the David Bowie Centre, at the V&A East Storehouse in Stratford, will allow members of the public to book “one-on-one time” with their own selections from the 90,000-plus items in the artist's personal archive, gifted to the museum by the David Bowie Estate in 2023. In other words, we all have the chance to get within smelling distance of - while preferably not touching - the costumes, stage-props, set designs, letters and handwritten lyrics that defined one of music's most dreamed about figures.