The huge new V&A East museum has just revealed its official opening date – and details of its opening exhibitions

It’s been a busy couple of years for London’s iconic Victoria & Albert museum, with a whole bunch of major development projects on the go across the city.

First, there was the £13 million revamp of the museum’s childhood-focused Bethnal Green outpost, which reopened as the Young V&A to  in June 2023 to critical acclaim, picking up the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award the following summer. 

This spring then saw the opening of another very well-received project, the V&A East Storehouse, a ‘working museum’ purpose-built to house half a million objects from the museum’s various archives while offering Londoners a peek behind the scenes to see how a museum goes about curating and caring for the items in its collection. 

And now, the museum group has announced the opening date for the second part of its east London development project, V&A East, which is due to open to the public on Saturday, April 18 2026. Opening just shy of a decade after it was first announced as part of the £1.1 billion development of Stratford’s East Bank cultural quarter, the 7,000 square metre museum will bring together exhibits that speak to both east London’s creative heritage and the voices that are shaping contemporary culture across the globe today. 

Also announced today are details of the free-to-visit permanent galleries, new commissions and temporary exhibitions that comprise the museum’s opening displays. These include the Why We Make Galleries, a permanent display spread across two of the museum’s five floors. The galleries will feature 500 objects from the V&A’s collection, arranged into ten key themes addressing the most pressing issues in contemporary society, from representation, identity and wellbeing to social justice and environmental action.

Early visitors to the museum will also be able to see the first iteration of a six-monthly creative commissions programme unveiling eight new east London-inspired artworks from the likes of Turner Prize-nominated artist Rene Matić and Tony and Olivier Award-winning designer Es Devlin. 

And finally, the venue’s temporary exhibition programme will open with the already-announced The Music is Black: A British Story. A landmark exhibition exploring how Black British music has shaped culture in Britain and beyond, it feature exhibits including Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, looks worn by Little Simz and newly acquired photography by Dennis Morris and Jennie Baptiste. 

The exhibition will also inspire the  inaugural edition of a new festival that will take place annually each spring, bringing together the East Bank’s neighbouring cultural institutions, which include the London College of Fashion, the BBC Music Studios, Sadler’s Wells East and UCL East.

That sure sounds like a hell of a lot of excellent contemporary art and design to take in. Keen to be one of the first visitors to see it all? Details for the museum’s grand opening are yet to be revealed, but get April 18 marked in the diary watch this space! As always, we’ll be giving you all the details as soon as they’re announced.

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