Tate Modern: A Power Station Full of Art

Why is it significant?

Stand on the lawn in front of Tate Modern and follow the chimney up: ninety-nine metres of brick, kept deliberately a little lower than the dome of St Paul's across the river, so that the cathedral would still rule the skyline.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on the lawn in front of Tate Modern and follow the chimney up: ninety-nine metres of brick, kept deliberately a little lower than the dome of St Paul's across the river, so that the cathedral would still rule the skyline. Before it was an art gallery, this building was a power station, and for about thirty years it burned oil to keep London's lights on.

Its architect was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a man who seemed to design half of Britain's twentieth century: Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, Battersea Power Station and, most famously of all, the red telephone box. Bankside Power Station began generating in the early 1950s and closed in 1981, when soaring oil prices made it too expensive to run. For almost twenty years it stood dark and empty on the riverside, and plenty of people expected the bulldozers.

Instead the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron turned it into a national gallery of modern art, which opened in May 2000. Their masterstroke was to keep the Turbine Hall, where the generators once roared, as one vast empty space, five storeys high and as long as a street. Artists have filled it with an artificial sun glowing through mist, a crack running the length of the floor, giant spiral slides, and a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, every one painted by hand in China.

In 2016 a twisted pyramid of brick lattice, the Blavatnik Building, was added at the back, with a viewing terrace on top. It started a very modern London quarrel. Residents of the glass-walled flats next door objected that thousands of visitors were peering into their living rooms, and in 2023 the Supreme Court agreed that the platform was a legal nuisance... a case now studied by every law student in the country.

The gallery changed this whole riverbank. In the 1990s Bankside was warehouses and empty wharves; today the riverside path is a crowded promenade again, which is exactly what it was four centuries ago, when Londoners came over the water to be entertained. Now head east along the river, with the water on your left. Just past the bridge, a row of old houses hides a little plaque with a very good story... and a very big fib.