Ten years ago today, David Bowie died. The news broke in the early hours of 10 January 2016, just two days after the release of Blackstar, and it landed with a strange, dislocating force. Bowie staged brilliantly with a remarkable album.

A decade on, Bowie feels as present as ever. Later in 2025, the V&A’s new centre in east London opened its doors, housing the David Bowie Archive: tens of thousands of objects spanning notebooks, costumes, lyrics, instruments and unfinished ideas. As the curator Geoffrey Marsh has said of the project, the aim is not to monumentalise Bowie but to keep him active: to allow future generations to encounter the working processes, detours and obsessions that shaped the work, rather than a fixed legend.

At the other end of the scale is the small terraced house in Bromley where Bowie spent part of his childhood, now in the process of being restored. The project has been framed a living space and art centre. The Heritage of London Trust, a London-based charity, has announced that it has acquired the terraced house at 4 Plaistow Grove in Bromley and plans to restore the interior to reflect its original layout during the years David Bowie lived there, between the ages of eight and 20, from 1955 to 1967. That this modest house should now sit within Bowie’s afterlife feels appropriate. Before Ziggy, before Berlin, before the global tours and constant experimentation, there was a suburban childhood marked by listening, drawing, and imagining elsewhere. Geoffrey Marsh said: “It was in this small house, particularly in his tiny bedroom, that Bowie evolved from an ordinary suburban schoolboy to the beginnings of an extraordinary international stardom – as he said, ‘I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room.”

Bowie’s cultural afterlife has also unfolded in ways he could never have predicted, not least on streaming platforms that did not exist when he was alive. For many younger listeners, his voice arrived not through vinyl or radio but through Netflix. When “Heroes” played over the closing moments of Stranger Things, the song suddenly broke Spotify records.

Tilda Swinton reflected on her personal connection with David Bowie, stating that the most resonant thing she “downloaded” from knowing him was “glorying how happy he was”.

Image: David Bowie’s last picture session by Jimmy King.