The V&A East opened its doors on Saturday morning in Stratford, on the old Olympic Park's East Bank, with an exhibition titled The Music Is Black: A British Story — 125 years of Black British music, from music hall to grime, assembled as a multi-sensory landmark. [1] Rowetta, the Happy Mondays and acid-house veteran who played Glastonbury last summer, is among the honourees. The show is free. The branch cost £135 million to build, part of a broader £600 million investment in the East Bank cultural quarter that also houses UCL East, Sadler's Wells East, BBC Music Studios, and the London College of Fashion. The timing, for a London the International Energy Agency this week named as operating on roughly six weeks of jet-fuel reserves, is either defiant or incongruous.

The paper's Thursday account of Europe's six-week jet fuel reserve and the IEA's naming of the blockade as cause argued that continental infrastructure is operating on a clock the public has not been told about. [2] A museum opening is, in that light, an odd object for a Saturday page. Museums are, as a class, the longest-horizon investments a society makes. A V&A branch is meant to be operational in 2126. The jet fuel question is about next month.

The exhibition is strong. Curated by Aleema Gray, with audio design by Mykaell Riley and the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster, it traces a line from the Edwardian music hall of Paul Robeson's London concerts, through post-war ska and lovers' rock, through Linton Kwesi Johnson and Brixton's 1970s sound-system culture, through Soul II Soul and the rave years, through UK garage and grime and the Afroswing moment. [3] Directional-audio ceilings place each era's sound in a specific physical footprint. The visitor moves through a century and a quarter of Britain as a listener to a city. [5]

It is also a statement about who speaks for Britain. The V&A is the state's most prestigious curator of taste. An East Bank branch opening with a first exhibition built entirely around Black British musical inheritance is a deliberate reframing of whose cultural labour has been constitutive of the country. The show places Robeson, Johnson, and Stormzy in the same building on the same plinth of national attention.

A prestige opening during a wartime reserve clock reads differently than a prestige opening does in peacetime. Peacetime culture is a currency paid out of confidence in the continuity of the state. Wartime culture is an insistence on that continuity. The V&A East's opening is the latter — the insistence that the country that funded £135 million of museum within a £600 million quarter on the Olympic Park is still the country that will fund museums on the Olympic Park.

Whether the insistence is warranted depends on whether the clock's warning is believed. The IEA's six-week number is operational and public and under-covered in the British press. [4] The Treasury has not commented. Sadiq Khan's statement at the opening did not mention it. The visitors on Saturday morning did not look as though they had chosen between the cases. They looked as though they had not heard the cases stated aloud. The soundtrack they listened to, from Robeson to Stormzy, is the century's archive of the form of the country.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London