Tate Modern

Where it sits. Tate Modern occupies the former Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark, directly opposite St Paul's Cathedral and joined to it by the Millennium Bridge. It holds the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art — work made from 1900 onwards — and is part of the Tate group alongside Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Entry to the collection displays is free, as at the other national museums; only the major temporary exhibitions are ticketed. In 2025 it drew 4,514,266 visitors, making it the most visited art gallery in the country and the fourth most visited attraction of any kind. Blackfriars is the nearest station, about 550 yards away; Southwark and London Bridge are both walkable, and the riverside path passes the front door.

The building it used to be. Bankside Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott — the same architect responsible for Battersea Power Station and the K2 telephone box — and built in two stages between 1947 and 1963. Before conversion it was a steel-framed, brick-clad slab 200 metres long with a single central chimney rising 99 metres, deliberately kept lower than the dome of St Paul's across the water. Internally it split into three east–west bands: the vast Turbine Hall down the middle, the boiler house to the north, the switch house to the south. The station closed in 1981 and spent more than a decade under threat of demolition; an application to list it was refused. In April 1994 the Tate announced Bankside as the site for its new gallery, an international competition was launched that July, and Herzog & de Meuron were selected in January 1995. The £134 million conversion ran from June 1995 to January 2000. The most visible external change was the two-storey glass box laid along one half of the roof. Inside, much of the original fabric was kept, including the overhead travelling crane still riding the length of the Turbine Hall. For years EDF Energy retained an operating electrical substation in the Switch House while the gallery occupied the Boiler House — a working power station and a national museum sharing one brick envelope.

The Turbine Hall. The hall is the reason the building works as architecture rather than as a converted shed: a single top-lit volume you walk down into, entering at the west end via a concrete ramp, with the scale of the old machine floor left intact. It has hosted a commissioned series since the gallery opened — sponsored by Unilever from 2000 to 2012, during which the company put in £4.4 million, and by Hyundai under a ten-year deal signed in 2013 that was then the largest single sponsorship ever given to a British gallery. Between commissions the hall takes other events: Damien Hirst's diamond skull For the Love of God was shown there in 2011, Kraftwerk played a sell-out run in February 2013 that crashed the ticketing system, and in 2018 it was used for performances of Messiaen and Stockhausen. It is also, simply, the best free indoor public room in central London.

On screen. Tate Modern is one of the London locations used in Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003), which was shot almost entirely on location across the city — Heathrow, Trafalgar Square, the central court of Somerset House, Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street, Selfridges, Lambeth Bridge, Chelsea Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, Canary Wharf, Marble Arch, the OXO Tower, City Hall, St Luke's Mews in Notting Hill and Poplar Road in Herne Hill among them, with the Downing Street interiors built at Shepperton. The building also has a curious second life as a fictional reference: in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), the "Ark of the Arts" — the state art bunker where Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica and a Banksy hang in a decaying Britain — is explicitly a nod to Tate Modern, though it was filmed inside Battersea Power Station, Scott's other Thames-side monster.

What you actually see today. The collection is hung thematically rather than chronologically, across the Boiler House galleries and the ten-storey Blavatnik Building extension that opened in 2016 in the old switch house. The extension's twisting brick lattice is worth the walk around the outside, and its top-floor viewing level gives a wide sweep over the river, the City and Southwark rooftops — with the caveat that part of the terrace was curtailed after a long legal dispute with residents of the neighbouring flats. Below ground, the Tanks — three circular chambers that once held oil for the power station — are given over to performance and installation work. Highlights of the permanent hang typically include Rothko's Seagram murals in their own dimmed room, Picasso, Matisse, Bourgeois and a strong post-war international selection.

Getting there and timing. Cross from St Paul's for the intended approach: the chimney lines up dead ahead. Weekday mornings and late Friday and Saturday openings are quietest. The building is step-free throughout, with lifts to every level and the Turbine Hall ramp doubling as the accessible entrance. Allow two hours, or a full day with the Blavatnik galleries and the riverside walk east.