East Bank, London
Picking up where London’s 2012 Olympics left off, East Bank is redrawing London’s already packed cultural map, and, in the shape of the V&A East Storehouse, reinventing our idea of a museum in the process. The vast industrial building that opened last year acts as a gallery-cum-storeroom, housing hundreds of thousands of items. While some, such as an entire section of the celebrated Brutalist housing estate, Robin Hood Gardens, are built into the fabric of the gallery, many can be seen as part of storage displays and others are accessible through the ‘order an object’ service. East Storehouse is one of the V&A’s two new venues in the area, the other, V&A East, opened this year alongside a new outpost from London’s modern dance institution Sadler’s Wells.
East Bank is just a 30-minute hop from Mayfair on the Elizabeth Line, and London’s newest underground line will also bring visitors to the new London Museum at Smithfield. Located in the once-derelict Victorian meat market buildings, the first phase of the new home of the Museum of London opens in November, cementing this as one of the most significant periods of cultural investment the British capital has seen for decades.
Stay at Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, London
