An East London stroll to the V&A Storehouse

Picasso’s impressive stage curtain for the legendary 1924 production of Le Train Bleu, a ballet performed by Paris-based Ballets Russes, at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new V&A East Storehouse in Stratford is a real showstopper. It’s the salvaged apartments from Robin Hood Gardens, a former housing estate in East London, with the haunting voices of former residents recorded when the estate was demolished, that stayed with me after we left though.

Robin Hood Gardens, two residential housing blocks built in the 1970s, was known as the ‘street in the sky’. A visionary social idea and home to hundreds of working class families. Photos give an impression of a dystopian concrete hulk where drug use and antisocial behaviour might thrive. Listening to its former residents narrate stories of their lives left a strong feeling of a vibrant community though.

Their enthusiasm and obvious love for this architectural experiment in communal living made the exhibit very poignant. Especially as it’s a time and place now vanished under the developers’ bulldozer. Like the rest of V&A East, it’s fascinating. The concept of the art store as informal gallery isn’t new. In Rotterdam, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, or the ‘Salad Bowl’, describes itself as the world’s first public art storage facility.

The Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, with its striking architecture and mirrored exterior reflecting the surrounding city back at the viewer, feels like a work of art designed to hold and display works of art. V&A East feels more like a B&Q warehouse. That though doesn’t take away from the experience of seeing parts of the collection that might otherwise not be on display – and it is an eclectic, at times bizarre collection.

The V&A is London’s design, applied arts and decorative arts museum, with a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects spanning 5,000 years of art and design. It somehow feels simultaneously like a car boot sale and high art showroom have been merged. Here is everything from clothing mannequins, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Art Deco Kaufmann Office, Chinese vases, the 15th century Torrijos Ceiling, a red telephone, and that huge Picasso.

Not to mention it also houses the David Bowie archive bequeathed by the musician to the V&A. It makes sense, he was a fashion icon, but we didn’t realise you needed a pre-booked ticket for that part of the collection. The scale of V&A East is impressive and the atmosphere much lighter and energised than a traditional museum. It was fun, which seems fitting for a collection that is all about fashion, theatre, design and pop culture.

To reach V&A East, which sits on the River Lee at Hackney Wick and has taken over the site of the former media centre that served the 2012 Olympics, we walked along the Regent’s Canal. When I first lived in London, the canal between Hoxton and Victoria Park felt like a no man’s land, passing through swathes of East London that had been rebuilt with grim-looking concrete apartment blocks after the Second World War.

Today, it is a very different story. The concrete blocks are still there, but the area has been transformed and gentrified. The canal is now a major thoroughfare for pedestrians and cyclists, although it still feels rough around the edges. We stopped into Broadway Market for a coffee and pastry – this one street next to London Fields was always a haven in the midst of the housing estates. A remnant of an earlier time.

London Fields retains a well deserved reputation for crime, not that you’d know it from all the speciality coffee places, trendy shops and restaurants. We walked through the area until we arrived at the Church of St John of Jerusalem next to Well Street Common, which at one time was an area of common land outside of London. It links with the lovely Victoria Park, and the area around here is one of the most upmarket in East London.

The vibe in this area, with its streets of Victorian town houses that escaped the bombing of the Second World War and wealthy residents, could not be more different to the nearby council estates. The proximity of the V&A East will not have harmed house prices. After we visited the museum, we headed back to this area and one of our favourite gastro pubs, The Empress. A delicious pub lunch was followed by a stroll through Victoria Park.