Tate Modern

Tate Modern's deepest holdings are in international painting and sculpture from roughly 1900 to the 1970s, where a small number of major single rooms (the Rothko Seagram Murals chief among them) and iconic single objects (Dali's Lobster Telephone, Matisse's late cut-outs, Warhol's Marilyn Diptych) carry the collection's reputation. Its second, more distinctive strength is scale: the Turbine Hall has, since 2000, been the venue for more large-scale, purpose-made contemporary commissions than any comparably sized room in any other museum in Britain, and several of those works (Eliasson's The Weather Project, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds) are now better known to the wider public than most objects in the permanent galleries.

Tate Modern occupies Bankside Power Station, a coal- and later oil-fired station designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (also responsible for the red telephone box and Battersea Power Station) and built in two phases either side of the Second World War, opening fully in 1963 and closing in 1981. The building sat empty on the south bank of the Thames, directly across the river from St Paul's Cathedral, for more than a decade before Tate, needing a home for its modern and contemporary collection separate from Tate Britain's historic British holdings, ran an international competition to convert it. The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron won that competition in 1995 and largely kept the building's exterior and its single defining internal volume: the turbine hall where the station's generating equipment once stood, a room 155 metres long and 35 metres to the roof. Tate Modern opened to the public in May 2000, on a GBP 134 million conversion, with the turbine hall serving simultaneously as entrance, circulation route and the museum's largest single exhibition space, a role no other part of the building can match.

From the opening weeks, Tate treated the Turbine Hall not as a lobby but as a annually or seasonally re-made artwork in its own right. Louise Bourgeois had the first commission, three nine-metre steel towers with mirrors and ladders, I Do, I Undo, I Redo, alongside her giant spider Maman, both on show for the museum's opening. Unilever sponsored the series that followed for twelve years, underwriting thirteen commissions between 2000 and 2012, including Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project in 2003, an artificial sun and mirrored ceiling that drew an estimated two million visitors and is still probably the single most-remembered thing to have happened in the building; Anish Kapoor's Marsyas, a single taut PVC membrane running the hall's full length, in 2002; Rachel Whiteread's EMBANKMENT, fourteen thousand stacked casts of the insides of cardboard boxes, in 2005; and Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds in 2010, around 100 million individually hand-painted porcelain seeds made with artisans in Jingdezhen. Unilever's sponsorship ended after Tino Sehgal's 2012 commission, and the Hyundai Commission has run the series since 2015, opening with Abraham Cruzvillegas filling 240 planters with soil gathered from London parks and gardens and continuing through artists including Philippe Parreno, SUPERFLEX, Kara Walker and, in 2018, Tania Bruguera, whose commission included quietly renaming the museum's original building after the local activist Natalie Bell, a change Tate chose to keep permanently rather than reverse after the commission's run ended.

Tate Modern's early success (over five million visitors in its first year, well past what the conversion had been designed for) put pressure on the original galleries almost immediately. Herzog & de Meuron returned to design an extension, a multi-storey, faceted, pyramidal tower rising over a folded concrete lattice and clad in perforated brick that filters daylight in and glows from within after dark. It opened in June 2016 as the Switch House and was renamed the Blavatnik Building the following year for its principal donor, the businessman Len Blavatnik. The extension added 60 per cent more display space, gave the museum three underground spaces called the Tanks (former oil-storage tanks, converted into museum galleries Tate describes as the first built permanently for live art, performance and film, opened ahead of the rest of the extension in 2012), and added a public viewing terrace on Level 10. Critics reviewing the new building at the time, among them Rowan Moore at The Guardian, Edwin Heathcote at the Financial Times, Douglas Murphy at Frieze and Robert Bevan at the Evening Standard, broadly approved of what Herzog & de Meuron had done with the extension's public routes and scale, while several raised questions about the brick facade's materiality and how comfortably the tower sits against the surrounding streets and neighbouring buildings, concerns that would resurface in a very concrete form once the terrace opened.

Tate Modern shows international modern and contemporary art from roughly 1900 to the present, hung across the Natalie Bell Building's Levels 2 to 4 and the Blavatnik Building's Levels 2 to 4, arranged thematically rather than by nationality or strict chronology, a curatorial approach the museum pioneered at its opening and has kept since. The free displays are where the collection's depth in twentieth-century painting and sculpture is easiest to see: Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals, a suite Rothko painted in 1958 for a New York restaurant commission he later withdrew from and largely gave to Tate instead, hang together as a single sombre room; Salvador Dali's Lobster Telephone and Henri Matisse's late cut-out The Snail sit among the museum's most photographed single objects; and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych, screenprinted within weeks of Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962 and recently cleaned by Tate's conservators, remains one of the most-reproduced works of American Pop Art anywhere. Loan exhibitions, which do carry a ticket, occupy dedicated spaces in both buildings; at the time of this research these included a major Frida Kahlo exhibition running into January 2027, alongside shows on Tracey Emin, the Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc, Ana Mendieta and the history of art photography. The Tanks, a level below the main galleries, carry the museum's programme of live art, performance and moving image, distinct from anything shown on the painting and sculpture floors above.

Tate Modern's record is not only what hangs on its walls. BP sponsored Tate, including Tate Modern, for 26 years, a relationship that became a sustained target of the activist group Liberate Tate from 2010 onward, with protest actions inside the galleries themselves. BP ended the sponsorship in spring 2016, citing a difficult business environment rather than the campaign against it, though the museum's own description of the partnership as its longest-running corporate sponsorship, set against six years of organised protest that stopped only once the money did, leaves the timing open to more than one reading. In 2019, following a wider reckoning across UK cultural institutions over opioid-linked wealth, Tate said it would stop accepting new donations from the Sackler family's trusts, while leaving existing gifts named after the family, including the Sackler Escalator at Tate Modern, in place. Separately, the Level 10 viewing terrace in the Blavatnik Building became the subject of a six-year legal dispute with the owners of neighbouring flats at Neo Bankside, whose glass-walled homes are visible from the platform. In February 2023 the UK Supreme Court ruled, by a 3-2 majority in Fearn v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, that the constant visual intrusion from hundreds of thousands of visitors a year looking into the flats amounted to an actionable nuisance, rejecting the argument that the platform's public value was itself a defence, and sending the case back to determine a remedy. None of this changes what the collection holds, but a record built to be checked against, rather than simply admired, should carry it.

The collection displays are free and unbooked every day Tate Modern is open, which is every day of the year except 24 to 26 December; hours run 10.00 to 18.00 Sunday to Thursday and 10.00 to 21.00 on Friday and Saturday. Special exhibitions are ticketed and priced per show. A visitor going only for the free collection and the current Turbine Hall commission can reasonably plan on two hours; adding a major loan exhibition, lunch and the Level 10 terrace makes it closer to half a day. Southwark Underground station and Blackfriars station are each about a seven-minute walk away, and the Millennium Bridge gives a direct pedestrian route across the Thames from St Paul's. Reviews in 2026 remain positive overall, with the free collection and the building's own industrial character the most consistently praised things about a visit, and the practical friction points concentrated almost entirely around busy ticketed shows and, for some visitors, lift access in the Blavatnik Building.

Visitors consistently rate Tate Modern highly and consistently cite the same three things: that the whole permanent collection is free with no booking, that the building itself (the retained turbine hall, the chimney, the industrial scale) is as much a draw as anything hung inside it, and that the upper floors and Level 10 give one of the better free river views in London. The recurring complaints cluster the other way, around the ticketed exhibitions rather than the free collection: popular loan shows get crowded fast, especially on weekday mornings and school holidays, and timed-ticket policies are not always clearly signposted at the door. A second, smaller cluster of complaints concerns lift reliability in the Blavatnik Building, which visitors with mobility needs or pushchairs flag more sharply than anyone else.