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Kansai Yamamoto’s costumes for Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s Berlin apartment house keys and his childhood saxophone are just some of the artefacts that visitors around the UK will be able to see when the V&A’s David Bowie archive goes on its first national tour this winter.

More than 100 pieces from the 90,000-item Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse in London – some of which have never been publicly displayed before – will make up David Bowie: On Tour, which commences at the V&A Dundee in November.

V&A contemporary performance curator Harriet Reed said that the archive revealed “an artist in constant motion – a restless, forward-looking mind at work beyond the music and images we know”.

The exhibition will comprise four parts: Bowie Through a Lens will examine the role of photography – by artists including Mick Rock, Terry O’Neill, Masayoshi Sukita and Brian Ward – in shaping Bowie’s identity. All the Somebody People considers Bowie in the studio and onstage, including handwritten notes for albums from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Lodger and Blackstar, stage designs from the Let’s Dance era and the koto Bowie played on the Heroes song Moss Garden.

Hooked to the Silver Screen will illuminate Bowie’s cinematic work, with sketches and treatments from music videos, contact sheets, clapperboards and Polaroids from film roles from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence to Labyrinth, The Snowman and even The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – as well as a script for an episode of The Simpsons that he declined to star in.

The final part, I Can’t Give Everything Away, looks at Bowie’s own instinct towards archiving: how he kept his first saxophone and the harmonica mic from his final tour; fan art, a 1988 passport, an early copy of the Velvet Underground’s 1967 single I’m Waiting for the Man, various lists, inventories and Post-it notes for future archivists; song charts and handwritten plans for projects that never came to fruition, including the previously revealed TV film The Catastrophe Cabinet.

The V&A director, Sir Tristram Hunt, called the tour a “landmark national partnership for the V&A” in a press statement. “Working with our colleagues in museums and venues nationwide, we’re opening up Bowie’s story in the places connected to his life and legacy, ensuring people across the country can experience these remarkable objects where they live, and be inspired by his enduring creativity.”

Bowie played Dundee, the first stop on the V&A tour, on the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1973. Blackpool’s Showtown is the second stop: in 1966, David Bowie and the Buzz performed on the south pier. The connection to the third stop, the Bowes museum in County Durham, isn’t quite so intimate: he played nearby Sunderland in 1987.

David Bowie: On Tour then moves to the Ferens art gallery in Hull, the city where his Spiders from Mars backing band hailed from. Initially known as the Hype, they formed when drummer John Cambridge tracked down Mick Ronson working as a parks department gardener for the city council. The Ziggy Stardust tour also stopped in Bristol in 1973 – after earlier Bowie performances in the city – the current final stop for the touring exhibition, although more venues are to be announced.

The V&A first showed Bowie’s archive in 2013. That exhibition toured globally, with 12 stops across Europe, North and South America, Japan and Australia, lasting until 2018. Last September, the V&A opened the permanent Bowie Centre at its new East Storehouse location in east London.

Music-based exhibitions have proven a winner for the V&A, with previous shows highlighting the careers and innovations of Annie Lennox, Taylor Swift, and Pink Floyd, as well as club culture, Black British music and grassroots music venues.

The tour dates so far

  • V&A Dundee: November 2026 – February 2027

  • Showroom, Blackpool: June – September 2027

  • Bowes Museum, County Durham: October 2027 – January 2028

  • Ferens art gallery, Hull: February – May 2028

  • Bristol museum and art gallery: June – September 2028