A closed power station opposite St Paul's became Britain's busiest art gallery
Bankside Power Station shut in 1981 and spent years under threat of demolition; even a bid to list it failed. Today, as Tate Modern, it draws more visitors than any other art gallery in the United Kingdom, some 4.5 million in 2025, most of whom pay nothing to get in.
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed Battersea Power Station, built Bankside in two stages between 1947 and 1963, directly across the Thames from St Paul's Cathedral. It was a brick-clad steel frame 200 metres long with a central chimney 99 metres tall. In 1994 the Tate chose it as the home for its international modern collection, and the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won the competition to convert it. The £134 million conversion finished in January 2000, and the Queen opened the gallery that May.
The architects kept much of the industrial skeleton. The vast Turbine Hall, which once held the generators, still has its overhead travelling crane and now hosts giant specially commissioned works each winter, first under Unilever sponsorship and later under a ten-year deal with Hyundai. The most visible outside change was a two-storey glass box along the roof. Popularity outran predictions: 5.25 million people came in the first year, against 2.5 million for all three older Tate galleries combined the year before.
Expansion followed. The power station's three underground oil tanks became galleries dedicated to live performance, billed by Tate as the world's first of their kind. Above them rose a ten-storey tower wrapped in brick latticework to match the old building, a revision of an original glass pyramid design that proved controversial. It opened on 17 June 2016 and was later renamed the Blavatnik Building after billionaire Sir Leonard Blavatnik, a major donor to the £260 million project.
The collection covers international art from 1900 onward, hung by theme rather than chronology since the opening. Part of the old switch house still works as an electricity substation run by EDF Energy.
Source: Tate Modern
