I HAD a couple of days in That London the other week and I went to an amazing place on the site of the 2012 Olympic Park called the V and A East Storehouse.

The V and A is, of course, the glorious Victoria and Albert Museum and the Storehouse is simply a place where they’ve decided to put some of their stuff on display (stuff that they wouldn’t usually display) over four packed-out floors.

It’s a simple and profound idea that, as these things always do, got me thinking about how I might learn lessons from the Storehouse and apply them round here.

The idea of the Storehouse is that museums have always got more things than they can display, sometimes for matters of room, sometimes for matters of taste, sometimes because they don’t fit in to any of the exhibitions they’ve got planned in the near future and sometimes because they’ve got more than one (sometimes a lot more than one) of the objects in question.

So the Storehouse has got, in no particular order and amongst many other objects, some guitars, some of the walls from a high-rise building near the site of the Olympic Park, toy cars, a scrunched-up piece of paper scrunched up by the artist Martin Creed, the roof of a temple and some very delicate-looking China cups.

With a few exceptions the objects aren’t labelled although there are handy QR codes you can upload which will tell you about them, but to be honest I often preferred the anonymity and obscurity of the things behind glass. And it’s free, which cheered my Barnsley heart.

I went home again fired up with enthusiasm for museums and contemplating the idea as a way of preserving and presenting our shared history in a really innovative way.

Let’s face it: we’re good at museums in Barnsley, and it’s great news that Experience Barnsley, our gem in the town hall, has won another fabulous award; the Family Friendly Museum Award 2025. Cannon Hall, the Cooper Gallery, Worsbrough Mill and Elsecar Heritage Centre are all brilliant, and I’m really proud of the work that volunteers do to keep the independent museums like Yorkshire Main, the Jubilee Museum in Cawthorne and the one that’s closest to my heart, and my house, Darfield Museum, going.

Now, in many ways Darfield Museum isn’t like the Victoria and Albert Museum but in one way it is, in that we’ve got lots of things that we can’t display because we haven’t got space.

People often give us objects and I think that they give them to us through a kind of beautiful love for the object and for the museum.

They’ve got an old washboard that used to belong to their grandma and they can’t bear to part with it but really they haven’t got anywhere to keep it so they present it to us at the museum because they know we’ll look after it and then they know that the washboard or the peggy tub or the family Bible can become part of Darfield’s and Barnsley’s and Yorkshire’s long history that’s available for all.

We could almost open a Museum of Washboards, but that’s beside the point, although not a long way beside the point, given that there’s a lawn mower museum in Southport. Maybe we could combine with them and start a Washboard and Lawnmower Museum, but maybe that’s for another day. Or another year.

So what we need is a storehouse where we can put all these objects on display. And you might say: ‘Well surely that’s just another museum, isn’t it?’ but the joy and the beauty of the V and A Storehouse is that it’s a working space, and that in rooms off the main display areas you can see people working on conserving the objects and you can see fashion students studying the fabulous dresses and suits that are kept there, and the displays keep rotating so that next time I go I will see some different things because the V and A is just like the rest of us: it’s got loads of stuff.

So here’s my plan: I’ll win the Euromillions and commission somebody to design a Storehouse on Wheels like a big double decker bus that can trundle round the borough displaying, well, stuff that means something to all of us.

And on the upper deck our curatorial team from Darfield Museum will be working on the art of preservation. What a great idea!

Now, where’s that lottery ticket?