Tate Modern

• 1. Introduction

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  Tate Modern stands in a building that once helped power London. On the 11th of May 2000, the Queen opened its doors for the first time, and in its first year alone, 5.25 million people walked through. That figure dwarfed what the three existing Tate galleries had managed together the year before, which was 2.5 million visitors combined. By 2025, the gallery was drawing over four and a half million visitors a year, making it the most popular art gallery in the United Kingdom.

  But the building itself raises a question that the numbers alone cannot answer. How did a decommissioned power station on the south bank of the Thames become the home of Britain's national collection of international modern and contemporary art? And why did that transformation require not one but two separate phases of radical construction, stretching across more than two decades? The answers reach back to 1947, to an architect already famous for a different power station, and forward to an Anglo-Ukrainian billionaire whose name now graces the building's newer tower.

• 2. The Building Before

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  Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station, designed Bankside Power Station. It was built in two stages between 1947 and 1963. The structure was 200 metres long, steel-framed and brick-clad, with a central chimney standing 99 metres tall. Its interior divided into three broad east-west bands: the enormous Turbine Hall at the centre, a boiler house to the north, and a switch house to the south. The station sat directly across the Thames from St Paul's Cathedral.

  The power station closed in 1981, leaving a vast industrial shell on a prominent riverside site. For many years after closure, it faced the threat of demolition by developers. Campaigners pushed for the building to be saved and put forward ideas for new uses. An application to list the building was refused. Then, in April 1994, the Tate Gallery announced that Bankside would become the home for a new gallery. Three months later, in July 1994, an international competition was launched to find an architect for the conversion.

• 3. The First Conversion

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  Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of the firm Herzog and de Meuron were announced as the winning architects in January 1995. The conversion cost £134 million, work starting in June 1995 and finishing in January 2000. The most visible external addition was a two-storey glass extension running along one half of the roof. Inside, much of the original structure remained intact, including the overhead travelling crane still suspended above the Turbine Hall.

  One portion of the building was not handed over at all. The southern third, the Switch House, stayed in the hands of EDF Energy, a French State-owned power company, which continued to operate an electrical substation on the site. The conversion work was carried out by Carillion, and the history of the project later became the basis for a 2008 documentary titled Architects Herzog and de Meuron: Alchemy of Building and Tate Modern. When visitors arrived on opening day, they found a Turbine Hall six storeys tall that could accommodate artworks of a scale almost no other museum in the world could handle.

• 4. The Turbine Hall Commissions

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  Louise Bourgeois was the first artist to exhibit a commissioned work in the Turbine Hall, with a show running from May 2000 to November 2000. The series that followed, named after its corporate sponsor Unilever, ran until 2012. Over that span, the company provided £4.4 million in sponsorship, including a renewal of £2.2 million agreed in 2008 to cover five more years. The series had originally been planned to last just the gallery's first five years, but its popularity extended its life by seven years beyond that.

  The roster of artists reads as a who's-who of major contemporary practice. Juan Munoz, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Whiteread, Ai Weiwei, and Tacita Dean each filled the hall with works built for its specific dimensions and atmosphere. In 2013, Tate signed a ten-year sponsorship deal with Hyundai worth around £5 million, at the time considered the largest sum ever provided to a single gallery or museum in the United Kingdom. The first artist commissioned under that agreement was the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, whose piece Empty Lot opened on the 13th of October 2015. The series has continued since, with Mire Lee's Open Wound occupying the hall from October 2024 through March 2025.

• 5. Expanding the Switch House

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  Plans to expand the gallery had been in preparation since 2004, driven by visitor numbers that outpaced all projections. The focus settled on the south-western section of the building, with an aim of adding 5,000 square metres of new display space, nearly doubling what was available. In 2006, EDF Energy released the western half of its Switch House holding, and planning began for a tower to be built over the old oil storage tanks beneath. Those tanks were to be converted into performance art spaces.

  The project was initially costed at £215 million. Funding came from multiple sources: £50 million from the UK government, £7 million from the London Development Agency, £6 million from philanthropist John Studzinski, as well as donations from the Sultanate of Oman and Elisabeth Murdoch. In June 2013, shipping and property magnate Eyal Ofer, chairman of Zodiac Maritime Agencies, pledged £10 million, bringing the project to 85% of its required funding. Nicholas Serota, then Tate director, said the donation would help make Tate Modern a "truly twenty-first-century museum". The structural and engineering consultancy work was carried out by Ramboll between 2008 and 2016.

• 6. The Tanks and the Tower

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  Three large circular underground oil tanks, originally part of the power station's fuel infrastructure, opened to the public on the 18th of July 2012 as the first phase of the expansion. They closed again on the 28th of October 2012 as construction of the tower above them continued. Tate describes them as "the world's first museum galleries permanently dedicated to live art." Two of the three tanks are used for live performance art and installations; the third provides utility space.

  The ten-storey tower above them, 65 metres high from ground level, opened on the 17th of June 2016, providing 22,492 square metres of additional gross internal area. Herzog and de Meuron again designed the extension, though its final appearance was not the original plan. The original design called for a glass stepped pyramid, but it was changed to a sloping facade in brick latticework to match the original power-station building, even though planning consent had already been granted for the glass version. In May 2017, the tower was formally renamed the Blavatnik Building, after Anglo-Ukrainian billionaire Sir Leonard Blavatnik, who contributed a substantial portion of the £260 million final cost.

• 7. How the Collection Is Hung

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  From the day Tate Modern opened in 2000, its curators chose not to display the collection in chronological order. Works were grouped instead by theme, with four broad groupings at a time each allocated a wing. The initial themes from 2000 to 2006 were History, Memory and Society; Nude, Action and Body; Landscape, Matter and Environment; and Still Life, Object and Real Life.

  The first full rehang in May 2006 moved away from those broad groupings and focused instead on pivotal moments in twentieth-century art, introducing spaces for shorter exhibitions between the main wings. A partial third rehang in 2012 blended some of those categories with new ones. As of June 2016, the eight themed areas included In The Studio, Materials and Objects, Media Networks, and Living Cities, each containing rooms that rotate works while the overarching theme stays fixed. The Boiler House shows art from 1900 to the present day; the Switch House concentrates on work from 1960 onward. The Henri Matisse show in 2014 set a record as London's best-attended charging exhibition, drawing 562,622 visitors across a run of nearly five months.