V&A East Storehouse – where creativity works

Credit: V&A East Storehouse | ©Hufton+Crow

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Here East is just another industrial shed, transplanted from a motorway junction in the Midlands and set down among the sporting venues of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

But across the board, there’s more to the story of Here East than meets the eye. In fact, this 1.2 million sq ft groundscraper, built to house broadcast studios for a few months during the 2012 Olympics, offers us insight into how cities can accommodate space for all sorts of organisations to make and create new experiences, while living alongside regeneration and new development.

ING has had a ringside seat for much of the Here East story, advising architect Hawkins\Brown following its work to convert the building to legacy use and helping UCL launch its space in the building. Most recently, we advised the V&A and its architect, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, on communicating the architecture and design of the new space during the phenomenally successful launch of V&A East Storehouse. I’ve taken some time to look back at the work done to turn Here East into one of the more interesting outcomes of the Olympic legacy.

Legacy was the buzzword of London 2012. Every venue had either a plan for how it would be used after the Games, or was a temporary structure. The Broadcast Centre was an exception – a huge permanent building with no clear legacy use. Conventional wisdom might have seen it used for warehousing or a data centre, but the Here East team, led by client Qatari Diar Delancey, had more imaginative plans.

Here East’s magic comes from looking at how to add people into the mix to create a place that is more accessible to creative users than competing space on an industrial estate. Three of the facades of the building have been glazed to create a 16m-deep “crust” of flexible office space that wraps around large, open spaces, creating a gregarious, human-scale layer on top of space to have big, creative ideas.

As well as space used by TV studios, universities, business and the Smart Mobility Innovation Office of Ford Europe, Here East is now home to a robotics lab jointly operated by UCL’s Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and Faculty of Engineering Sciences. Studio Wayne McGregor, a complex of dance studios that is home to the award-winning choreographer, has been built as a building-within-a-building in the vast space. A two-storey gantry that previously supported the heavy-duty air-handling apparatus used to cool the TV studios has been filled with laser-cut timber Wikihouse sheds rented out as creative studios by The Trampery.

V&A East Storehouse is the latest addition to this unique grouping. At its heart, Storehouse is a working museum facility that uses 16,000 square metres in an industrial shed to store, care for and study the V&A collection. But it’s also within reach of a huge audience in the local area and beyond, creating the opportunity for the V&A to achieve its long-held ambition to open its storage to the public.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s design for V&A East Storehouse makes great effect of the dissonance between the anonymous exterior the building and the astonishing contents of the four-storey Weston Collections Hall within. The procession of entering through a perfectly ordinary street door, followed by what feels like passing through like a secret passage onto a platform suspended in the middle of a cloud of artefacts is a highly crafted set-piece that already feels like one of London’s must-see architectural experiences. A visit to Storehouse, where you find your own way through the dizzying mass of the collection while museum staff go about their daily business, is the kind of experience that will inspire people to think creatively about their relationship to museums. Maybe someone will be inspired to look at museum work as a career choice, or to think critically about the way an exhibition is put together: the V&A has given them room to come to their own conclusion.

This is a useful reminder to all of us that creativity is work – we learn when we’re doing and when we’re watching others do work. Often when we talk about creative space in new development, we mean places like theatres and galleries, where we’re able to enjoy the products of creative work, and we can forget that those things need to be made somewhere. Here East is also a great example of the skill that creative people have to produce something exceptional when they’re given the room and the freedom to explore big ideas. If we want our cities to be creative, space is the most valuable commodity.