Building the Bank: V&A East and the architecture of belonging

The rise of the East Bank, and how a Balenciaga dress became the final answer to a fourteen-year-old promise.

East London has always made things. Three hundred years ago, Huguenot silk weavers fleeing religious persecution in France set up their looms in Spitalfields and produced fabrics so exquisite that even the royal court came to buy them.

One of the most celebrated designers among them was Anna Maria Garthwaite, a woman who arrived in east London in her forties, unmarried, with no formal training, and built an international fashion design business from a terraced house on Princelet Street. Her watercolour patterns, vivid florals on silk, are still held in the V&A's collection today.

Now a new V&A has opened a few miles further east, in Stratford, carrying those same collections into the part of London that inspired them. It feels like a homecoming.

On Saturday, 18 April, V&A East Museum opened its doors at East Bank in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It is the final major venue promised to the East Bank cultural quarter, which also includes Sadler's Wells East, the London College of Fashion, UCL East, and the V&A East Storehouse. The BBC Music Studios will follow in 2027, but in terms of buildings the public can walk into today, this is the one that completes the set.

And the building itself is worth the walk.

The Dress, the Void and the View

Architects O'Donnell + Tuomey were appointed to the V&A East in 2015 and spent a decade working on a building whose animating idea came, of all places, from a visit to V&A South Kensington. There, architect John Tuomey encountered an X-ray photograph of a silk-taffeta evening dress by Balenciaga; one of those 1950s couture garments that seemed to float around the body rather than cling to it. The space between fabric and skin, between structure and surface, became the organising principle of the entire museum.

The result is a five-storey building wrapped in 479 precast concrete panels, sand-coloured and angular, scored with linework that emphasises the surfaces, perhaps even resembling the rapid sketches of a fashion designer mid-thought.

The triangular glazing reveals flashes of the London College of Fashion next door. This is not accidental. As associate director Eimear Hanratty has described it, the architects wanted to have a conversation with the neighbouring buildings. The fashion school is literally visible from the museum inspired by fashion.

Another intentional aspect of this design is that, until you reach the paid exhibition space on the third floor, there are no push doors or fire doors, no corridors, no lobbies… nothing to cause you to hesitate. It should feel free, welcoming, accessible. The design is intended to provoke a sense of belonging in London's art scene, to draw a new audience in to explore and connect.

Which raises a question that no amount of beautiful concrete can answer on its own.

Sources: Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, Making Buildings, John Jervis Building Design., V&A East by Debika Ray

Can You Design a Soul?

East London's creative heritage has never been about grand institutions. It has been about people finding space. The Spitalfields weavers worked from their homes. The artists of Hackney Wick colonised abandoned industrial warehouses. The grime producers of Bow used pirate radio frequencies because nobody was offering them studio time. East London creativity has always been the ingenuity of making something from whatever, and wherever, is available.

So in a £1.1 billion plan to build a cultural quarter, the instinctive question is whether it will feel like it belongs to the people who live here.

Early signs are encouraging. The V&A East Museum's permanent exhibition, Why We Make, spans two floors and over 500 objects. Its inaugural show, The Music Is Black: A British Story, explores how Black British music has shaped national culture from 1900 to the present. The interior spaces draw on the rhythm of high streets and parks, environments that may be more familiar to younger Londoners than traditional galleries. Concrete benches, with a design purposefully reminiscent of those found in town centres, are dotted throughout. Café Jikoni offers meal deals for local residents and under-25s.

The building is designed to be a place where locals, as well as tourists, can spend time, socialise, and rest without pressure to be productive, active or spend money.

No building designed by award-winning architects and funded by a billion-pound programme can pretend to be scrappy. But V&A East isn't trying to replicate east London's creative energy. It's trying to give it somewhere new to go.

Whether that works will depend less on the lofty dreams of architects and more on what actually happens in the years ahead. But the story of how this dream began is interesting.

From industrial wasteland to the London 2012 Olympics

E20 had seen grand plans before. When London won the Olympic bid on 6 July 2005, the promises were specific and the scepticism was justified. The site in Stratford was more than 500 acres of brownfield land (former chemical works, fertiliser plants, landfills and depots) where the Environment Agency described the soil as "grossly contaminated." A twenty-foot-tall 'fridge mountain' of discarded white goods stood where the Aquatics Centre stands today.

The promise was that this would not become another abandoned Olympic Village. At this point, the Olympics had a dismal global track record: Athens, Beijing, Rio were littered with rusting venues. In London's bid, the organisers insisted, the regeneration would be the reason for hosting the Games.

We opened our Stratford office in 2011, the year before the Games. At that point, this was still a postcode people passed through, a transport hub with a hum of construction around it and not much reason to linger. We saw the cranes. We saw Fridge Mountain disappear. We saw the first families move into the Athletes' Village, renamed East Village, and we started doing what we do: helping people find their home in a neighbourhood being built around them.

Today, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is part of daily life. The London Aquatics Centre, Zaha Hadid's great wave, is a public swimming pool where local families book lanes on Saturday mornings. The velodrome hosts community cycling sessions. The London Stadium has been transformed into a permanent multi-use venue under the world's largest cantilever roof, home to West Ham United on match days, host to the World Athletics Championships, Major League Baseball, and sold-out concerts.

This took deliberate, sustained, sometimes hardheaded political will. And it set the stage for the bigger, slower, starrier-eyed ambition: East London's own cultural quarter.

The dream of the East Bank

East Bank was announced by the Mayor of London in 2018 as a £1.1 billion investment, but some of the change here was already underway. The arrival of the Elizabeth line cut journey times and sparked new interest in the area, joining the Jubilee, DLR and Overground in connecting E20 easily across London, with Central London around 25 minutes away and Heathrow reachable in roughly 45.

Then, we watched the East Bank arrive piece by piece: the London College of Fashion welcomed students to its new campus in 2023. UCL East opened. The V&A East Storehouse launched in 2025 to wide acclaim, recently making TIME's list of the World's Greatest Places. Sadler's Wells East opened in early 2025, a heavy hitter for the performing arts.

Every addition changed the conversation we were having with buyers and renters. What was once a commuter-hub premium started becoming a cultural one, where proximity to a world-class museum, a performing arts venue and acres upon acres of parkland carries weight that goes well beyond a fast train to Paddington.

What is becoming clearer on the ground is that E20 now operates as its own neighbourhood rather than an extension of wider Stratford. It is a large postcode with a distinct identity, defined as much by its parkland, sport and culture as by its connectivity.

Here, running clubs loop the park before work. Basketball, netball and boxing facilities make the Olympic legacy feel genuinely lived in. Dogs and bikes are everywhere, and on some weekends the ABBA Voyage crowds pass through in sequins and sparkle. The atmosphere is social and exciting, which is part of what attracts people putting down roots.

Many buyers moving into E20 are already rooted in east London, coming from places like Hackney and Bow. What draws them is space, value and the ability to stay within the same social orbit while living in a very different environment.

And now the final piece of the East Bank is ready to make its mark: V&A East Museum is open.

The question now is whether the locals feel like they belong. Will families in East Village pop in on a Saturday? Will students at the London College of Fasion treat it like a second campus?

That is what the V&A East was designed for. Its open stairways, its doorless ground floor, its high street-style benches... They are a signal to anyone who lives here, works here or is thinking about making E20 home. Come in. Get comfortable. This space is yours.