I’ve been working on and within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for 13 years. In my very first week in this job, the then director of the V&A, Martin Roth, plonked an enormous document on my desk and said ‘take a look at this, and let me know what you think’.

It was an early schematic of what a culture and education district might look like within the Park, as part of the London 2012 legacy project.

It’s been the most extraordinary privilege to complete the full circle journey from that moment to the opening of the V&A East Museum last month. In that time, I’ve come to think of myself as an honorary East Londoner, because you can’t be part of these transformational projects or fully understand an area if you don’t absolutely dive in – and this has been a full‑immersion experience.

From the early ideas of the then Mayor Boris Johnson’s ‘Olympicopolis’ as a version of South Kensington’s ‘Albertopolis’ for the digital age, came a plan to bring the V&A to East London. We were quickly joined by Sadler’s Wells, UCL East, London College of Fashion, the BBC and The Smithsonian, who were part of the original master plan.

The evolution of the early plan, which came after Sadiq Khan took office, involved us turning V&A East Museum into V&A East Museum and Storehouse. That was not in there at the beginning, but is one of the silver linings of projects that end up taking an incredibly long period of time; you get to change and adapt as you go.

V&A East Museum was not always guaranteed. It was an exciting proposition, an irresistible invitation, but it took a long time before people thought, ‘we’re definitely going to do it’. There was a moment of real jeopardy where it wasn’t certain at all. That was around the remaster-planning of the site and the fact that the V&A had not found a home for its collection, then stored at Blythe House.

It seemed like a choice: either do V&A East Museum, or work out where to put the Blythe House collections. We couldn’t do both.

But that moment gave us enough time to come up with a new proposition: Museum and Storehouse. If that crisis had not occurred, Storehouse wouldn’t exist. East Bank is a stronger proposition by having 350,000 objects and 1,000 archives in a facility that promotes them as a resource to be accessed, mined, and deployed by creatives.

I think that is one of the great triumphs of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, plus how so many people doggedly refused to let it be anything other than the best it can possibly be. I don’t know anywhere else in the world where there is a complete collision of a park, a place of leisure, of sport, culture, education, entertainment and innovation all coalescing. It’s kind of a miracle.

The two mayors should take a lot of credit for being so committed and taking so much political risk. The Olympic legacy could have been a place of very dense residential and commercial development, but it’s not. It’s something very different, and that was hard won by people who refused to accept anything less than it being extraordinary.

East Bank will be successful depending on whether it lands as an idea. It’s a philosophy around collaboration, innovation, and co‑production, and with V&A East Museum now open and the Music Is Black Festival running all summer, East Bank will fully come to life. People will start to understand what it means and why it matters, and that’s great, because up to now it’s been quite a nebulous concept, as is often the case until these things actually open.

The East Bank Board was established by the London Legacy Development Corporation to corral the partners and manage governance. That was then handed over to the partners to take ownership, with James Purnell at UAL in post first, and I took over as chair about three years ago. Continuity felt important, and my three years coincided with the opening of V&A East Museum, so it felt like an elegant solution to hand over the baton to Alistair Spalding of Sadler’s Wells next. I’ve been working on all this for 13 years, it’s not like my work here is done, but it’s a nice punctuation mark to go back to the ranks. 

Since the beginning of all this we’ve talked a lot at the V&A about how we could land in East London without seeming to be parachuting in. The fact it’s taken so long to deliver also gave us longer to build bridges with an audience which is rightly sceptical of big national institutions. But we wanted people who live and work in the four Olympic boroughs to walk into V&A East Museum and Storehouse and feel a sense of ownership. To think, ‘I helped shape this’.

The V&A East Youth Collective has been an extraordinary part of the experience. They have given us their view on every aspect of Storehouse, from the wayfinding to the menu to the content. They go in there now, and I genuinely think they can feel, ‘I made this happen. I wasn’t just consulted’. Every single aspect was shaped by those young people.

Our museum director, Gus Casely-Hayford’s work, getting on his bike to cycle out to over 100 local schools, is such an important part of that. I don’t think there will be many local school children who haven’t met Gus. For the V&A to have been working in East London for a decade before we opened anything – there is a real benefit to that.

Bethnal Green’s Young V&A, V&A East Museum and Storehouse are new types of institutions that respond to the geography and the demographic complexity of the places they are in. The design of Storehouse tries to demystify what happens in a museum and change perceptions of what the V&A actually is. It’s not all high culture: the V&A is about everything.

In the Storehouse Collection Hall, you’re surrounded by objects like a Vespa scooter or an item from a classic American diner. That process of demystification is brilliant to watch. And this is a long‑term investment. Our lease at Here East is 100 years, and our lease on the museum is 200 years.

Whether it’s up in Dundee or even over at our site in Shenzen, we are not in the business of franchising, we’re in the business of finding new ways of connecting the V&A collection with new audiences. One of the messages that ran through all our marketing campaigns is: these are your collections. We are the custodian, but they’re yours. Use them for inspiration, work opportunities, life skills, a hobby, or whatever it might be, but do just come along and use them.

Tim Reeve is Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Hear more from him about the photographic exhibition that honours the 200+ businesses uprooted to make way for the QEOP in the current spring 2026 print edition of The Wick.