Simon Willison’s Weblog

V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London

27th August 2025

We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture.

First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year.

This is a delightful new format for a museum. The building is primarily an off-site storage area for London’s Victoria and Albert museum, storing 250,000 items that aren’t on display in their main building.

The twist is that it’s also open to the public. Entrance is free, and you can climb stairs and walk through an airlock-style corridor into the climate controlled interior, then explore three floors of walkways between industrial shelving units holding thousands of items from the collection.

There is almost no signage aside from an occasional number that can help you look up items in the online catalog.

I found the lack of signs to be unexpectedly delightful: it compels you to really pay attention to the items on display.

There’s so much great stuff in here. I particularly appreciated the two storey street-facing façades of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist London residential estate completed in 1972 and demolished in 2017 through 2025. I also really enjoyed the Kaufman Office, an office space transplanted from Pittsburgh that is “the only complete interior designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright on permanent display outside the USA.”

The building is a working museum warehouse and preservation facility, and there are various points where you can look out into the rest of the space (I enjoyed spotting a cluster of grandfather clocks in the distance) or watch the curators arranging and preserving new artifacts.

I’ve added it to Niche Museums with whole lot more of my photos.

In the evening we headed to the Fortune Theater to see Operation Mincemeat at the recommendation of several friends. It’s a fantastic musical telling the story of a real British covert operation that took place during World War II. A cast of five take on over 90 roles, sometimes switching roles live on stage multiple times during a single number. It’s hilarious, touching, deeply entertaining and manages to start at high energy and then continually escalate that energy as the show continues.

The original British cast (three of whom co-wrote it) have moved to New York for a broadway production that started in March. The cast we saw in London were outstanding.

It’s a tiny theater—the West End’s second smallest at 432 seats (the smallest is the Arts Theater at 350) which makes for an intimate performance.

I absolutely loved it and would jump at the chance to see it again.