A £100 million museum with 130,000 artworks is coming to the UK

If you’re in the know about all things artsy, you’ll likely have heard of, if not visited, the new V&A East Storehouse in London. Opened last year, it was named among the best places to visit in the world in 2026 by TIME magazine and offers a peak at more than 250,000 objects. At the institution you’ll find everything from Mughal architecture and vintage Vivienne Westwood jackets to 350,000 books in 1,000 different archives.

Set up as a ‘working museum’, the Storehouse is the first of its kind and has no permanent displays or exhibition, instead letting each of its objects be moved around by the people at work behind the scenes.

If being able to rifle through artifacts without shuffling after a guide or cramming like sardines into a packed exhibition hall sounds like your kind of thing, we come with good news. There will soon be another museum following the same archive-led model, and this time it’ll be in Edinburgh. 

The National Galleries of Scotland has announced it has started construction on The Art Works, a new free-to-visit experience in Auld Reekie. Complementing the masterpieces on display at Scotland’s National, Portrait and Modern galleries, it’ll be home to 130,000 pieces which visitors will be able to interact with face-to-face. Once built, you’ll be able to pull out storage racks of paintings. Dedicated viewing rooms will let you flick through photos and drawings from the archive.

At the moment, only about 3 percent of the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection is actually accessible to visitors. The Art Works would bring a lot more of the archive to view.

The Herald has estimated the cost of constructing the building at £100 million, although director general Anne Lyden said it was ‘difficult to put final cost on the project given global uncertainty’.

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is set to receive £56 million in government funding to begin construction. Work on the building, which will be located in Granton, a waterfront neighbourhood in north Edinburgh, is expected to begin this summer and The Art Works is set to open its doors in 2029.

Once completed, the National Galleries of Scotland has plans to rejuvenate levels three and four of the National Gallery, which are accessed from the Mound.

🏛️ The best museums in the UK.

Did you see that Glasgow’s Chinatown will be transformed by a £160 million project?

Plus: why this backstreet museum full of old computers is one of the UK’s greatest museums to visit in 2026.