When Stormzy took the Glastonbury stage in 2019 as the first British rapper to headline the festival, the stab-proof vest he wore sent a message that went far beyond music. Designed by the artist Banksy and bearing the Union Jack, it was a statement about identity, violence, and what it means to be Black and British. That vest has now found a permanent home at V&A East, the brand new museum that opened this weekend in London’s Olympic Park, where it serves as one of the emotional anchors of a sweeping new exhibition called The Music Is Black: A British Story.
The show marks the very first installation at V&A East and traces 125 years of black British music through more than a hundred artifacts, each one carrying its own weight of history. Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar sits alongside stage outfits worn by Seal and punk icon Poly Styrene. Handwritten lyrics to Michael Jackson’s Thriller appear in one corner. Jerry Dammers’ original sketches for the 2-Tone record label logo appear in another. Together they map a musical lineage that is both globally influential and distinctly rooted in the British experience.
A story that begins long before the charts
The exhibition does not begin with British music. It begins with the music that traveled to Britain, carried across oceans by people whose stories are inseparable from colonialism, migration, and faith. Jazz, reggae, the blues, and gospel are all traced to their roots before the show follows them into the communities where they landed and began to transform.
That transformation is the exhibition’s central argument: that the genres most associated with contemporary British culture, among them grime, garage, trip hop, drum and bass, and two-tone, did not emerge from nowhere. They grew directly from the sounds that arrived with the Windrush generation and the generations that followed. Of the eight distinctly British musical movements identified by the V&A, seven trace their lineage back to reggae alone. A recent industry report found that black music has accounted for the vast majority of the British music industry’s revenue over the past three decades, a figure that reflects its influence on everything from pop to electronic music.
Winifred Atwell and the piano that made history before Stormzy
Among the most striking objects in the show is a battered upright piano that looks as though it has lived several lives. It belonged to Winifred Atwell, the Trinidad-born musician who purchased it deliberately out of tune from a second-hand shop and used it to record what became the first number one single by a Black artist in UK chart history in 1954. The piano’s surface is covered in graffiti, messages and names etched into the wood by fans at Atwell’s own invitation. She went on to spend 117 weeks in the UK charts and fronted her own television programs on both ITV and the BBC, breaking barriers that few before her had managed to cross.
How British reggae found its own voice and paved the way for Stormzy
The exhibition captures the moment when immigrant music stopped being an echo of somewhere else and became something new. Members of the band Aswad, children of the Windrush generation, describe in the show how their inability to write about Jamaican landscapes or Caribbean summers forced them to write about what they actually knew. British schools, grey skies, cold streets, and the particular texture of growing up Black in England became their material. That specificity, rather than limiting them, is what allowed audiences here to connect.
Stormzy’s vest, a statement, and what comes next
Stormzy’s vest arrives near the end of the exhibition’s journey, and its placement feels intentional. It is the product of everything that came before it, the rebellions and innovations and quiet persistence of artists who built something remarkable without always being given permission to do so. The exhibition does not frame that history as finished. It frames it as ongoing.
