David Bowie's entire archive will be accessible to the public from 2025 onwards in an offshoot of London's Victoria and Albert Museum. The collection of material from all phases and creative areas of the career of the innovative pop star, who died in New York in 2016, comprises around 80,000 objects. This includes handwritten lyrics, sheet music, costumes such as those for "Ziggy Stardust" and "Aladdin Sane", instruments, stage sets, letters, notebooks, designs for record albums and concepts for never-realized projects, including a musical based on George Orwell's novel "1984".

Bowie kept everything from the six-decade period from the sixties until his death and catalogued it himself. The archive will be donated to the Historical Museum of Applied Arts, which also houses a Department of Theatre and Performing Arts. The family foundation of Ukrainian billionaire and patron Sir Len Blavatik and the Warner Music Group, which controls the rights to Bowie's compositions and lyrics, are contributing ten million pounds to the David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Art in the museum's new depot on the former Olympic site in East London.