David Bowie: On Tour The V&A Takes Bowie’s Archive Across the UK
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More Than 100 Rare Objects Reveal the Creative Mind Behind David Bowie’s Most Iconic Work
David Bowie was never simply a musician. He was an artist in constant motion reinventing his image, sound, characters and visual language while continually looking towards what might come next.
Now, for the first time on this scale outside London, audiences across the UK will be able to see that creative process up close.
From November 2026, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will take more than 100 highlights from its David Bowie archive on a national tour, beginning at V&A Dundee and continuing to Blackpool, County Durham, Hull and Bristol over the following years. David Bowie: On Tour offers a rare opportunity to encounter objects from Bowie’s personal archive, many of which have never previously been displayed publicly.
The tour begins at V&A Dundee from November 2026 to February 2027, followed by Showtown, Blackpool, from June to September 2027; The Bowes Museum in County Durham from October 2027 to January 2028; Ferens Art Gallery in Hull from February to May 2028; and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery from June to September 2028. Further venues are to be announced.
For anyone interested in Bowie, however, the significance of this tour goes well beyond a collection of costumes and memorabilia. It offers something much more revealing: a glimpse into how David Bowie actually thought, worked, planned and created.
Inside David Bowie’s Creative Process
The V&A acquired the David Bowie archive in 2024, through the generosity of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group. It contains more than 90,000 items, spanning Bowie’s extraordinary career — from costumes and musical instruments to handwritten lyrics, photography, stage designs and personal papers. The touring exhibition selects 100 highlights from this vast collection and organises them across four sections: ‘Bowie Through a Lens’, ‘All the Somebody People’, ‘Hooked to the Silver Screen’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’.
Together, they reveal something that finished recordings, performances and photographs cannot: the work that happened behind them.
Among the material are handwritten notes, sketches, performance instructions, Polaroids from make-up and costume fittings, unrealised projects, personal possessions and objects that document Bowie’s decisions at different stages of his career.
This makes David Bowie: On Tour less a conventional retrospective than an examination of an artist’s working mind.
Bowie Through a Lens: Creating an Image
The exhibition opens with ‘Bowie Through a Lens’, exploring the extraordinary role photography played in constructing Bowie’s image and identity. Works by photographers including Terry O’Neill, Mick Rock, Sukita and Brian Ward demonstrate how photography became part of Bowie’s creative vocabulary. For Bowie, image was never simply documentation. It was part of the performance itself — another medium through which identity could be constructed, transformed and challenged. The archive allows visitors to look beyond the finished photographs and understand how the visual mythology surrounding Bowie developed.
Ziggy Stardust: Building a Persona
The second section, ‘All the Somebody People’, explores Bowie on stage and in the studio across four defining periods.
The Ziggy Stardust era provides perhaps the clearest example of Bowie’s ability to construct an entire artistic world around music.
Visitors will see costumes associated with Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto, alongside Bowie’s handwritten notes and cut-ups used while developing the album, sketches for the tour and a seminal acoustic guitar from the Ziggy Stardust era, being shown publicly for the first time. These objects reveal that Ziggy Stardust was not simply a character that Bowie performed. It was a carefully developed creative concept involving music, clothing, performance, graphic ideas and visual identity.
Berlin: Reinventing the Sound
The exhibition then moves into Bowie’s Berlin years, a period associated with some of the most experimental music of his career.
His work with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno on Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) demonstrated Bowie’s willingness to explore unfamiliar techniques, recording methods and musical environments. The archive brings this period to life through objects including Bowie’s keyboards from his apartment at Hauptstraße 155 in Berlin, unseen sketches and concept art for the cover of Low, handwritten lyrics for Lodger’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, and the koto, the Japanese musical instrument Bowie used on ‘Moss Garden’ from “Heroes”. For visitors, these objects provide a physical connection to a period when Bowie was actively dismantling his previous musical identity and experimenting with new forms.
Let’s Dance: Designing the Spectacle
The ‘Let’s Dance’ section reveals another dimension of Bowie’s creativity: his approach to large-scale performance.
Unseen lyrics and a set design for the Serious Moonlight tour will be displayed for the first time, alongside photographs documenting studio recording sessions and the album’s cover shoot.
The material shows how Bowie was not simply producing songs and then presenting them on stage. The visual and physical experience surrounding the music was an integral part of the project.
★ (Blackstar): The Final Creative Chapter
Among the most poignant material in the exhibition are objects connected to ★ (Blackstar), Bowie’s final recording.
The section explores the symbolism through which Bowie revisited elements of his earlier work while creating something distinctly new.
Visitors will see Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for ‘★ (Blackstar)’, a hand-painted costume from the ‘Lazarus’ music video, performance notes and props. Many of these objects have never been shown before, offering an unusually intimate perspective on the creation of his final album and the visual world surrounding it.
From Music Videos to Labyrinth: Bowie on Screen
The third section, ‘Hooked to the Silver Screen’, explores Bowie’s groundbreaking relationship with film and television.
His approach to music videos was as inventive as his approach to music, and the archive contains material documenting that process across decades. Highlights include Bowie’s storyboard sketches and the Natasha Korniloff-designed costume for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980), as well as material relating to his collaboration with Flora Sigismondi on the ‘Little Wonder’ video in 1997.
The archive also contains unseen video treatments, scripts and props connected to ‘The Stars Are Out Tonight’, from the 2013 album The Next Day. Bowie’s film career is represented just as extensively. Contact sheets from his first film set, The Image (1967), sit alongside the clapperboard used for The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975), unseen preparation notes for Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), and material from his role as Jareth in Labyrinth (1986). Particularly revealing are the script, character notes and Polaroids of costume fittings, together with additional Polaroids documenting make-up tests. The section also recalls some of Bowie’s more unexpected screen appearances, including his role as narrator in The Snowman (1982) and his appearance as Lord Royal Highness in the 2006 SpongeBob SquarePants film. Even the projects Bowie did not pursue become part of the story: the archive contains a script for an episode of The Simpsons that he politely declined.
What Bowie Chose to Keep
The final section, ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, may ultimately be the most revealing because it moves away from the public image of Bowie and towards the personal archive he chose to preserve. Among the objects are his first instrument, a Grafton Alto saxophone bought by his father in 1961, and the harmonica microphone used during his final live tour, A Reality Tour (2003–2004).
There are also fan artworks, the stopwatch Bowie used while songwriting, his 1988 British passport, and his advance copy of The Velvet Underground’s 1967 recording ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. Perhaps even more revealing are the documents that show Bowie thinking about the future. A handwritten to-do list records workshops, interviews and museum visits he had planned. Charts identify projects he hoped to achieve including projects that never materialised. Among them is a handwritten synopsis for a proposed television film, The Catastrophy Cabinet, dating from approximately 1974–1975. Other documents reveal Bowie organising his thoughts and planning ahead: his 1977 inventory of costumes, material concerning the future of the music industry, the song chart used during the Earthling tour in 1997, and Post-it-note conversations with his archive team about the objects he wanted to retain. This is where the archive becomes particularly powerful. It does not only preserve Bowie’s achievements. It preserves his intentions, possibilities and unfinished ideas.
A National Tour for a National Collection
The tour represents an important part of the V&A’s commitment to widening access to its collections, allowing audiences across the UK to experience objects from their national collections closer to home. It also carries particular significance at each destination.
The first stop, V&A Dundee, has a direct connection with Bowie: he brought the Ziggy Stardust Tour to Dundee’s Caird Hall in 1973.
In Blackpool, the exhibition arrives as the city marks the 60th anniversary of Bowie’s live performance in the resort.
Hull has its own important connection through Mick Ronson and the Spiders from Mars, whose contribution to Bowie’s musical history remains central to the city’s cultural identity. In Bristol, the exhibition will arrive during the summer of 2028, while the Ferens Art Gallery will host the tour as part of the programme surrounding its centenary in 2027. The Bowes Museum, meanwhile, will bring the archive to audiences in Northern England, extending access to Bowie’s creative legacy beyond the traditional cultural centres.
From 90,000 Objects to 100 Stories
The scale of Bowie’s archive is almost difficult to comprehend: more than 90,000 objects, representing an extraordinary record of a career defined by transformation. Yet the importance of David Bowie: On Tour lies not in quantity alone. It lies in what these objects reveal. A costume can explain a character. A handwritten lyric can reveal an idea before it became a song. A Polaroid can document a transformation before an audience ever saw it. A discarded project can show where Bowie might have gone next. Taken together, they reveal an artist who was rarely satisfied with simply repeating what had already worked. The V&A’s national tour therefore offers something particularly valuable: the opportunity to encounter Bowie not only as the finished cultural icon, but as the curious, experimental and forward-looking creator behind the icon.
The David Bowie Archive: A Permanent Home in London
Although David Bowie: On Tour will travel across the UK, the archive itself has a permanent home at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse, part of East Bank in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Visitors can also access individual objects from the archive through the V&A’s Order an Object and Archives Appointment services, allowing the public to engage directly with the collection.
The national tour consequently becomes another chapter in the life of the archive: a collection originally preserved for future generations now travelling to communities across the country. For an artist whose career was defined by movement, reinvention and the refusal to stand still, there is something fitting about that. David Bowie: On Tour does not simply bring Bowie back to the stage.
It brings the evidence of his imagination to a new generation of audiences allowing visitors to see the notes, instruments, costumes, sketches, photographs, unfinished ideas and personal objects that existed before the legend became history.
David Bowie: On Tour - UK Dates
V&A Dundee, Scotland: November 2026 – February 2027
Showtown, Blackpool: June – September 2027
The Bowes Museum, County Durham: October 2027 – January 2028
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull: February – May 2028
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: June – September 2028
Further venues: To be announced
About the V&A
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is a family of museums dedicated to the power of creativity. Its mission is to champion design and creativity in all its forms, advance cultural knowledge and inspire makers, creators and innovators.
The V&A shares a 5,000-year-old story of creativity through exhibitions, events, educational programmes, digital experiences, conservation and research, alongside a national collection of more than 2.8 million objects spanning every creative discipline.
Official website: vam.ac.uk
Instagram: @vamuseum
Facebook: @VictoriaandalbertMuseum
TikTok: @vamuseum
The David Bowie archive was acquired by the V&A in 2024 through the generosity of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.
The archive is the permanent home of an extraordinary body of material documenting Bowie’s career, while the national tour allows a selection of that collection to be experienced by audiences across the UK.
Patricia Holdener
Editor-In-Chief
Luxe Magazine Switzerland
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