“What an opportunity for everyone to see these historic pieces in first person. It’s so eclectic. And all parts of the process of displaying and curating.”

HRH The Princess of Wales

Forget everything you know about museums. The V&A East Storehouse, which opened earlier this year in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is rewriting the rules so completely that calling it a "museum" almost feels wrong.

Built inside what was once the media center for the 2012 Olympics, this isn't your grandmother's stately museum with hushed corridors and "Do Not Touch" signs everywhere. Instead, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have created something that feels more like stumbling into a treasure hunter's warehouse—if that treasure hunter happened to have impeccable taste and 600,000 objects spanning centuries.

The space is massive—bigger than 30 basketball courts—yet it flips traditional museum design on its head. Instead of guiding you through a predetermined path, it drops you deep into the "storehouse" itself, where the building becomes part of the exhibit. You're not just viewing a collection; you're inside the collection.

Here's what makes this place genuinely radical: most of those 600,000 objects aren't behind glass. You share the actual air—and yes, the smell of leather, wood, and preservation chemicals—with centuries-old artifacts. One visitor described the visceral shock of finding themselves "eye to eye with a multi-hundred-year-old, gold-leafed saint." It's the kind of intimate encounter with history that traditional museums simply can't offer.

But the real game-changer? The "order an object" service. See something intriguing but can't get close enough? Ask, and if the object is stable, staff might actually let you handle it. When was the last time a major museum invited you to touch a historical artifact?

The collection itself is staggering: Frank Lloyd Wright's only complete interior outside the United States, the largest Picasso on display in the UK (an original Ballets Russes stage cloth), and a 15th-century Spanish palace ceiling that makes you crane your neck in wonder.

This radical openness comes with trade-offs that have visitors divided. The arrangement feels deliberately "random"—objects from different eras and cultures sit side by side without the careful curation you'd expect. QR codes replace traditional labels, which works brilliantly when the codes function, and frustratingly when they don't.

"The museum is beautiful and inspiring," one visitor noted, "but none of the QR codes worked—they didn't bring up info about the objects at all. That's a huge drawback and we expected better from the V&A."

The logistics can be brutal too. Long queues snake around the building (sometimes in the rain), and even V&A members get no priority access. Some visitors report spending as much time waiting outside as they do exploring inside.

Despite the operational hiccups, there's something undeniably magical about watching conservation work happen in real-time through glass-walled labs, or discovering that you can peer into the working heart of a world-class museum. The E5 Bakehouse-run café offers a decent pit stop, though don't expect culinary fireworks—the real feast is visual.

The V&A East Storehouse isn't trying to be a better traditional museum—it's trying to be something entirely different. It's messy, overwhelming, and occasionally maddening. It's also breathtaking, intimate, and genuinely revolutionary.

One visitor summed it up perfectly: "It's so 'not museum,' and that will bring more ownership of the collection." In an age when cultural institutions struggle to stay relevant, the Storehouse feels like a bold experiment in what museums could become when they stop hiding their treasures and start sharing them.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it worth the queue, the confusion, and the occasional broken QR code? For anyone who's ever felt that museums keep their best stuff locked away from the people who need to see it most—absolutely yes.

The V&A East Storehouse is open Wednesday to Sunday. Free entry, but expect queues. Located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford.