Bowie collection to go on show at V&A archives in Olympic Park

It looks like the Hangar 51 storeroom from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with row upon row of boxes and artefacts kept in climate-controlled conditions, but it is far from secret - the V&A East Storehouse team hope 250,000 people a year will visit and gain access to archives such as the David Bowie collection.

- Lanre Bakare

Delayed because of the pandemic, the storehouse, one of two new locations for the museum, will open to the public on 31 May 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. Tim Reeve, the deputy director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, said the storehouse, designed by the New York-based architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is “fundamentally different to the way any museum has thought about its non-display collections”.