A report by Constance Kampfner for The Times of London.

The V&A’s new east London museum will open in 2025 with an exhibition celebrating black British music.

Spanning from 1900 to the present day, The Music is Black: a British Story, will feature early pioneers, such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Winifred Atwell, up to Stormzy and the recent Mercury award winners Ezra Collective.

It will showcase genres born both inside the UK, and outside but given a British twist. Jazz, reggae, two-tone, drum and bass, trip hop, garage and grime will all feature, using audio pulled from the BBC’s music archive.

The exhibition will highlight successes, while also exploring ways in which black music has been marginalised in Britain. Jacqueline Springer, the show’s curator, said: “More than anything else, it should alert people to things that they weren’t aware of and to question why that is.”

The hip-hop trio She Rockers, 1988

Jennie Baptiste, the London-born photographer whose music portraiture has been displayed in galleries worldwide

GEORGE EKSTS

Springer said she wanted to show how in each generation a different genre of music is demonised, and pointed towards the ways in which drill was often accused of encouraging gang violence.

“Every music that we will be tackling has been accused of exactly what drill is accused of. Jazz, rock’n’roll, heavy metal, rave music,” Springer said. “You see patterns of alarm about music that young people make. Eventually, those very artists are heralded three decades later as pioneers. And then a new genre is deemed to be the boogie man.”

The exhibition will also use the new museum space to explore the relationship between east London and black British music over time. The area is known for its music festivals and nightclubs, as well as being the birthplace of grime.

The exhibition will chart how grime rose from London estates to Stormzy’s Glastonbury triumph in 2019

ADRIAN BOOT

V&A East, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, will comprise two sister sites. There is the museum and V&A Storehouse, which will provide public access to hundreds of thousands of items that are rarely on display at the main site.

The project, part of the mayor of London’s £1.1 billion creative regeneration plan for the former Olympic park, has been pitched as a way of engaging different communities with the work of the V&A.

Gus Casely-Hayford, its director, has previously criticised the art world for “shoring up the status quo” and failing to represent people from a diverse background positively. The exhibition would “tell a long-overdue story about the creation of our national sound and its impact on culture around the world”, Casely-Hayford said.

Trevor Nelson, the music broadcaster, said: “There are so many different colours and shades of black music, and so many eclectic styles that have emerged from the UK. The fact that we haven’t had a national exhibition on black British music is quite surprising to me. I feel it needs to be documented.”