Inside the Storehouse from level 2. That glass floor is a lot of fun.
Another hot and sweaty weekend in London, with prolonged highs of 30°C. The temp settled around 27°C on Friday evening as we strolled by the Thames under sunset skies, our spirits lifting after a disappointing meal at Lambeth’s Garden Café. We decided to walk the tourist route past Parliament and along Whitehall to Trafalgar Square for late-night ice cream in Leicester Square, which we enjoyed sat opposite the big All Bar One where I’d worked in the ’90s.
On Saturday, we went to the new V&A East Storehouse in Olympic Park, and it’s interesting because it’s a different kind of museum, like you’re in that storage hangar at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and someone opened up all the boxes. Highlights are the hanging chunk of Robin Hood Gardens social housing estate, an enormous Picasso reproduction, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann Office, all seemingly permanent and benefitting from prominent info panels.
But everything else is, apparently, in flux, and that’s an excuse not to label things. It’s refreshing to amble around without being bombarded with information, but also quite a shallow experience in terms of actually learning anything; if an item sparks curiosity, you need to tap numbers into your phone to find out more (a hit-and-miss experience as some items are omitted).
One serious gripe: I get that everyone must leave their bags, but the lockers are embarrassingly problematic. It’s a very cramped space packed with confused people and no in/out flow. The actual locks require a series of twists and presses to set a temporary four-digit combination and it’s so complex that staff have to talk people through moves which could pose issues for visitors with arthritis, long nails, poor vision, etc. The lockers lack privacy (they have large windows) and aren’t particularly secure (we imagined several ways one might acquire someone else’s stuff through observation or deception). This frustrating user experience needs reconsidering, as there are many better alternatives.
My main reason for this latest trip to London was an afternoon of advanced field recording tuition in Greenwich, and I’ll write about that in a separate post.
