In June 1748, the Prince of Wales and his wife Princess Augusta visited Sir Hans Sloane at his Chelsea home. The Irish-born physician was famous worldwide for his collection of artefacts. He had assembled them thanks to his connections throughout the burgeoning British Empire. A trader from the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Sloane a walrus skull. The First Lord of the Admiralty gifted him a silver penis-protector he had acquired in Darien, now between Panama and Columbia. Sloane showed the prince and princess trays of precious stones, then his bezoars, a subject Sloane had lectured on while Secretary of the Royal Society. Then they stepped into a room full of corals, crystals, fossils and feathers. It was, said the Gentleman magazine, ‘a most magnificent philosophical entertainment’.

Our forefathers held single objects, or small groups of them, with a steady gaze. In his book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, the naturalist John Ray, Sloane’s early mentor, details his observations of the species of butterflies found near his house in Braintree, Essex. He then extrapolated his findings across the country, then the world. Sloane’s collection was an exemplary act of seeing objects twice in this way; scrutiny of the individual object to differentiate it, before imagining how many more such objects or different types there were across a globe that seemed to grow larger with every vessel returning to Plymouth. Michel Foucault wrote that ‘natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible’, but imagining the not yet visible played its part, too.

In post-Reformation Britain, those with the time and money to gaze upon objects could no longer direct their attention towards reliquaries. These were papist, and so, natural wonders took their place: the wonder of the world replaced the wonder of the Resurrection. The teeming range of the Creation, including its oddities, were a real draw, and the figures who brought them together, such as Sloane, were the showmen of the age.

When Sloane died in 1753, and the British Museum was founded, his collection was moved to the magnificent Montagu House. According to Sloane’s biographer, James Delbourgo, the British Museum took on Sloane’s system of arranging his collection, with the viewer beginning with base matter such as minerals and then moving onto the plant and then the animal world. Visitors could look down a long enfilade of rooms and see the gradations of the natural world play out before their eyes.

The British Museum proper, finally completed in 1852, replaced the demolished Montagu House. It is dominated by long rooms, the 90-metre King’s Library above all, now suitably called the Enlightenment Gallery. Appreciated from one end of the room as a simple arrangement of knowledge, it accumulates a sense of its own vastness. It is a suggestive picture: nature captured, geography tamed, immensity implied.

The boundaries of scientific knowledge have since expanded and museums have diversified in response, from the scientific to the artistic, from the general to the highly specialised. But the aesthetic experience first seen in the days of Sloane and the early days of the British Museum is making a comeback.

Ironically, far from being institutions trusted to act as arbiters of social conflict, museums have become central to contemporary identity debates. Dan Hicks, who became curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2007, took the term decolonisation in a literal sense. In his writings and practice he takes the fact that museums were often founded on colonial appropriation as a justification to undo them. His argument is that museums’ primary aim should be cataloguing their inventories and then making restitution to their victims. This is a long way from the view that the mission of a museum is to preserve and explain.

In parallel, a new idea of the museum has emerged: the storehouse.

There are many institutions that claim to have the first modern open storehouse. The Schaulager in Basel, opened in 2003, has a claim to be the first. It is a profoundly weird place: a place for the Laurenz Foundation to store the contemporary art it buys. Works are kept in vaults under optimal conditions with regard to temperature and humidity, while remaining permanently accessible for study purposes. This effectively means they are kept as one might see them in a gallery. Visiting it is a step into the uncanny.

The Schaulager caught the imagination of European institutions paying large money for storage space; what if they could make that storage work as a feature of the museum itself?

During the refurbishment of Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the museum built its depot adjacent to the building. Clad in burnished steel, the curved façade of the 40m-tall building reflects back the Boijmans itself. It is simply called the Depot. You enter it by travelling upwards in a glass elevator amid thick glass display vitrines, showing clusters of objects: a stack of fearsomely uncomfortable looking post-modernist chairs, a group of gurning self-portraits by early 20th-century Dutch artists, a plastercast of ‘Eve After The Fall by Rodin’, the marble version of which is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

The Depot has a utilitarian purpose. It is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility, housing over 155,000 objects. It also includes curved stacks of nationally, even globally significant artworks, that can be pulled out at apparent random by dedicated tour guides, but which, when resting, stretch out into the gloom away from the light filtering down into its central space. We are offered views of thousands of different creative universes that go deep into human history, vibrating at the edge of our capacity to rationally comprehend them. The Depot, like other storehouses, encourages a philosophical-aesthetic response, like the ‘most magnificent philosophical entertainment’ that the Prince of Wales was drawn to in the 18th century albeit marked by a very different intention.

In London, the new V&A Storehouse is situated in a vast 80,000 square metre shed that was built as a broadcast centre for the London Olympics in 2012. You enter at the end of the building, and, as with the Depot in Rotterdam, you then take an escalator straight into the heart of the collection, with objects arrayed around and above: a 360-degree experience, with collection spaces beneath visible through a glass floor, and every level visible to every other. Particularly striking is a 17th-century colonnade from Agra in Uttar Pradesh, India: five columns, four lintels, with three double and two single brackets.

One floor currently includes the facade of a brutalist housing megastructure that once stood not far from Stratford. It also includes an example of the Frankfurt Kitchen, made to the designs of the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, installed in flats in Frankfurt during the 1920s, the first mass-produced modern kitchens. Other objects are mounted at the end of stacks, often deliberately exotic. There’s a Moulton foldable bicycle, a collection of bayonets, an amazing funkadelic portrait of opera singer Sir Willard White by June Crisfield Chapman. Objects in situ look like well-performing posts on Instagram.

Overall there are 250,000 objects on display, barely one tenth of what the V&A holds in its entirety but here packed into 160 square metres; a tiny portion of the vast shed’s floor space. The sheer range of objects heightens the experience as does the type of material. In storage, the works exist between two kinds of death: the end of their function and their final destruction. We are now no longer concerned with the works of God or Nature, but Man, and we are not concerned with the size of his works but the sheer multiplicity. This is a new kind of sublime.

Near Boston Spa in Yorkshire is one of Britain’s most historically loaded sites: an old munitions plant halfway up, halfway down the country, built for distributing weaponry to repel the Nazis. After the Second World War, the site was redeveloped as a depot for what would become the British Library. The UK publishes more books per capita than any country in the world. Undergoing successive expansions since then, it is being redeveloped.

The plans include a fully-automated, low-energy archive building designed to cope with the massive expansion in book production we have witnessed in recent years. One of the early impacts of the digital revolution on literacy was to allow a huge increase in the number of books that get published and distributed. The building is water and airtight, allowing the  book stacks to be deoxygenated to levels similar to the base camp to Everest, and thus decreasing the risk of fire massively, as well as lowering energy usage. Eight million books and a fully automated retrieval system will live in one sealed room about the size of a football pitch and about 10 stories high.

This huge shed gives away nothing about its contents. Inside, the architects envisage a space in which books are piled up slowly by robots. But they have also given over one bay, behind a super airtight window, to house a visitors’ room where the public will be able to look on. Once a book goes into this new facility, there’s only an 11 per cent chance it will ever come out again. The architects are also working on a similar facility for the Bibliothèque Nationale in France.

In these spaces, human history can be understood as something vast. It weighs on the mind as a physical thrill. Audiences get an aesthetic punch rather than being directly told about the historical processes that predate them. The risk is that, in overlooking the power of story, we may forget what museums can do. They should make us feel the impact of history, its enormity and scale, but should also remind us that new history can happen too, in which human beings play their part.