A 15th-century coloured wood ceiling from Toledo’s now-destroyed Altamira Palace will be resurrected within the V&A’s new collection and research centre at Here East.

It is just one of the treasures that will be brought out of storage at the museum of art and design in Kensington, and into the public view for the first time in generations.

V&A East replaces plans for a data centre which formed a key part of iCITY’s bid to manage the former 2012 Olympic Press and Broadcast centre buildings when it won six years ago.

Visitors will be invited on “behind-the-scenes” journeys to discover how and why objects are collected, how they are cared for, conserved, researched and displayed, and how they help make sense of our past, present and future.

Some 250,000 objects will be on rotating display from some of the V&A’s smallest curiosities to the largest and most significant rooms and building fragments in the collection.

V&A deputy director and COO Tim Reeve said: “V&A East is timely and ambitious. It will – for the first time – illuminate the entire lifecycle of museum practice in a transformational experience for visitors. From the moment of an object’s acquisition, through its conservation, the research, enquiry and debate that follow, to its display as part of the story of an exhibition, this 360-degree view is unprecedented and will revolutionise how people experience, and are inspired by, our collection.”

Spaces within the centre will host workshops, performances and screenings, and a dedicated viewing gallery will showcase a changing display of rarely-seen large rolled objects, from theatre stage cloths to carpets, textiles, tapestries and paintings - including a 15-metre-wide theatrical backcloth designed by Natalia Goncharova for the 1926 Ballets Russes’ production of Stravinsky’s Firebird. The Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion will relocate there from Blythe House in west London.