the Design Museum

This guide to the Design Museum starts in a boiler room, the damp basement Terence Conran converted at the V&A in 1982 to argue that everyday objects deserved a museum of their own. It follows the Boilerhouse's four sensational years, the 1989 move to a converted banana warehouse in Shad Thames, and the saddle-roofed Commonwealth Institute building that had sat empty since 2003. Look up at that concrete roof, barely seventy-five millimetres thick at its edges.