V&A East Museum
On Saturday 18 April 2026, V&A East Museum opens its doors to the public for the first time, as part of East Bank in the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Designed by world-renowned architects O’Donnell & Tuomey, V&A East Museum is co-created with young people, creatives, and east Londoners, and celebrates the power of making and creativity to bring change.
Fuelled by the creativity of east London, V&A East Museum brings together the worlds of art, design, fashion, music, and performance in a brand-new five-storey space right next to East Bank partners London College of Fashion, UAL, the BBC, Sadler’s Wells East, and UCL East. Supported by the Mayor of London, V&A East Museum is the sister site to the critically acclaimed V&A East Storehouse, which opened in May 2025. V&A East Museum completes the V&A East project, one of the UK’s biggest new museum projects of the decade.
Behind its doors, in front of which stands Thomas J Price’s 18ft sculpture A Place Beyond, V&A East Museum opens its first landmark exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story — the largest ever exhibition on Black British music’s impact on culture across the UK and around the world.
It also includes two permanent Why We Make galleries offering a new, topical lens on the V&A’s global collections, alongside New Work creative commissions by artists including Tania Bruguera, Rene Matić, and Carrie Mae Weems. The museum also features displays co-produced with local artists and young east Londoners, an expansive live events programme spotlighting the people, ideas, and creativity shaping global culture right now, and Café Jikoni, an exciting partnership with the restaurant group known for “cooking across borders.”
V&A East Museum’s Architecture
"We’re proud to see V&A East Museum take its place within the dynamic landscape of East Bank in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Our design is driven by the idea of openness — a building that welcomes its community, celebrates creativity, and frames the exchange between art, people, and place. It’s not just a museum, but a civic space for dialogue, discovery, and shared experience."
— Jen McLachlan, V&A East Project Director
Statement from John Tuomey, co-founder, O’Donnell + Tuomey:
Since winning the architectural competition for V&A East Museum in 2015, we have worked with the V&A team to make a new kind of museum, welcoming to a wide audience. V&A East Museum stands on a public square as part of East Bank, Stratford’s new cultural and educational district. Making public work with civic purpose is a motivating principle of our practice. V&A East Museum has been a special project in our portfolio — we are delighted to see it open its doors.
Positioned on Waterfront Square, V&A East Museum is conceived as a place for people to meet, find ideas, and encounter making in all its forms. The V&A’s brief for O’Donnell + Tuomey was to design a museum that would be welcoming, distinctive, and open to all, particularly young people, east London communities, and visitors who may not previously have felt at ease in museum spaces.
O’Donnell + Tuomey’s response was to create an open and truly public building at the centre of East Bank that celebrates craft, materiality, and making, designed to prompt curiosity and draw people inside while protecting the museum’s objects.
O’Donnell + Tuomey drew inspiration from seeing Cristóbal Balenciaga’s sculptural tailoring in the V&A’s collection, particularly his attention to the space between garment and body, as well as the Japanese concept of “Ma,” or “the space in between.” This informed the idea of a protective outer shell that wraps around an internal core. The space between the façade and the structure becomes a sequence of dramatic circulation routes that guide visitors upwards.
The folded façade, crafted in intricate detail, gives strength and identity to the architectural form. The exterior is formed from 479 sand-coloured precast concrete panels, each uniquely shaped and scored with profiles that reference the V&A’s distinctive logo. The linework of the panels aligns to create a unified pattern along the three-dimensional folded façade that catches the changing light over the course of the day, animating the building’s exterior. Benches integrated into the façade at ground and podium level bring people into close contact with the building and extend its threshold into the public realm.
Inside, five public levels contain two permanent galleries, a 900 sqm temporary exhibition gallery, a top-floor project and event space, learning facilities, and a café. Spaces are aligned vertically and connected by a continuous circulation route carved from the thickness of the external walls. Terrazzo concrete floors reinforce material continuity with the public area outside the museum. Carefully positioned windows along the circulation routes and three public terraces introduce daylight and bring the outside in. Two entrances at the waterfront and podium levels offer a barrier-free welcome through triangular openings that recall pattern-cutting darts. The crafted white interiors throughout create a calm backdrop for permanent gallery fit-out, commissions, live events, and temporary exhibitions.
