Half-a-million treasured artefacts including clothes worn by the Beatles and a wooden ceiling from a lost Spanish palace have been moved in a "monumental" operation to the V&A's new site in east London.

The national collections that began almost 170 years ago have been moved from South Kensington to the V&A’s East Storehouse, which opens next year in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The move was the museum’s biggest move of items since the Second World War when its collections were taken out of London for safety when the Blitz started.

It involved 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and 1,000 archive collections that have all now been audited, checked and documented.

“The completion of this monumental move has been years in the planning,” the V&A’s chief operating officer Tim Reeve confirmed.

“It represents a milestone in our mission to remove barriers between the public and their national collections.”

Visitors can “immerse themselves in the magical behind-the-scenes world of a working museum” when the Storehouse complex opens in 2025.

“We are bringing the collections to the four Olympic boroughs,” Tim added, referring to Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest. “This is a part of London with a rich creative heritage and potential for a new audience.”

The extraordinary collection includes the Glastonbury Festival archive and clothes from world-famous designers such as Issey Miyake.

Last to be transported were three life-size fibre-glass panda sculptures depicting China’s popular Hi Panda streetwear brand during the post-1980s era and 127 paintings created in the 1880s that documented earlier cave paintings at the Ajanta Unesco World Heritage site in India.

Large objects include a complete 1930s interior of American businessman Edgar J Kaufmann’s office and a 15th century gilded wooden ceiling from Spain’s lost Torrijos Palace near Toledo.

Also mong the artefacts is a collection of 3,500 shoes including a pair of 19th century Egyptian bath clogs, 20th century Nike football boots, 1950s Christian Dior evening shoes and everyday design classics like Dr Martens.

Theatre archives include an ornate headdress worn by Vivien Leigh in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Old Vic in 1937 and The Beatles' shift dresses made for the 1964 premiere of A Hard Day’s Night.

Other V&A collections include 1,600 paintings spanning 2,000 years, fragments of a Roman fresco and 80,000 children’s books such as the 1585 edition of Aesop’s Fables complete with woodcuts.

The V&A Storehouse is one of two sites where visitors next year will be able to go “behind the scenes” to wander among half-a-million works from every era and corner of the globe — all being made more accessible to a wider public.