Today. It’s a day of London days.
London is blowing out twenty-six candles on a birthday cake the size of a power station.
Because on May 11th, 2000, something extraordinary happened on the south bank of the Thames. A great brick beast that had once burned oil and made electricity opened its doors and started generating something else altogether.
Not megawatts.
Astonishment.
Tate Modern was born.
And London, bless it, did what London does when it gets something new and huge and strange and brilliant. It came to have a look. It came in droves. It came over the river, under the railway arches, along Bankside’s old streets and river paths. And a few weeks later, when the Millennium Bridge opened, it came pouring straight across the Thames from St Paul’s itself.”
It came with guidebooks and pushchairs and folded newspapers and mild suspicion. It came saying, “Modern art? Hmmm.” And it left saying, “Good grief, that was something.”
This was not just the opening of a museum. It was a change of current. The lights went on in Bankside.
But before we get to the art, we have to talk about the beast itself.
Yes, the building.
Because Tate Modern is one of those London places where the building gets there before the art does. You see it from across the Thames and it has the nerve, the sheer architectural cheek, to hold its own against St Paul’s Cathedral. There they are, facing each other across the river. Wren’s great dome on one side. Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick power station on the other. One building made for prayer. One made for power. And then, in a very London turn of events, the power station becomes a temple.
Stand outside Tate Modern and London arranges itself like a stage set. Across the Thames to the north: St Paul’s and the City skyline climbing up behind it. Just downstream to the east: Shakespeare’s Globe. The Millennium Bridge threading the river between them. And all around you, Southwark: railway arches, old wharves, market streets, ghosts of prisons and theatres and bear pits. Few museums in the world are so magnificently positioned.
Bankside Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the same man who gave us Battersea Power Station and the red telephone box. So yes, the chap had a feel for icons. The place was built in stages after the war, opened as a power station in the early 1960s, and finally stopped generating electricity in 1981. Then it sat there, enormous, silent, slightly reproachful, like a retired battleship moored beside the Thames.
And enormous is the word. The building is about 200 metres long. That’s two football pitches laid end to end, with a bit left over for the goalkeeper’s existential crisis. Its chimney rises 99 metres. Deliberately lower than St Paul’s, because even in the age of electricity London still knew when to bow to Wren.
Inside, the famous Turbine Hall is the great theatrical coup. Once it housed the machinery that powered London. Now it houses awe.
And then came the transformation.
In 1994, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron were chosen to convert the old power station into a new home for modern art. Their genius was not to scrub the building clean and make it polite. They let it remain itself. They kept the muscle, the brick, the industrial bones. They didn’t put a tutu on a rhinoceros. They taught the rhinoceros to dance.
Tate Modern opened to the public on May 11th, 2000. The Queen opened it. The public poured in. Tate had expected perhaps a couple of million visitors in its first year. It got more than five million. Not a successful opening. A cultural stampede.
And what people found inside was unlike anything Britain had seen before.
Not a dusty procession of polite landscapes behaving themselves in gold frames.
This was Picasso deforming bodies to express emotional violence. Rothko making colour feel like weather. Pollock attacking canvases as if he were wrestling with the universe. Duchamp putting a urinal in a gallery and changing art history forever. Matisse cutting paper into joy. Dali turning dreams into hallucinations.
Bonnard. Braque. Magritte. Mondrian. Moore. Lichtenstein.
A century of explosions.
One description of Tate Modern says it beautifully:
“Tate Modern, take one, was the ordinary made extraordinary… A few years on, the strangeness was cranked up a notch with the arrival of one of the most enigmatic buildings London has ever seen.”
Exactly right.
Because Tate Modern isn’t just a museum.
It’s an experience.
An argument.
A provocation.
A playground for the imagination.
And yes, sometimes a bewilderment.
Modern art can intimidate people. People wander in nervously as if they’re about to sit an exam they forgot to revise for. They stand before an enormous abstract canvas thinking: am I missing something?
Which is where the right guide changes everything.
And this is where London Walks has played a blinder.
Every Wednesday afternoon London Walks runs The Tate Modern Highlights Tour guided by arts critic Rick Jones, Secretary of the Critics’ Circle.
And judging from the response of his walkers, Rick has a habit of turning bewilderment into delight.
Rick is one of those gloriously overqualified London Walks characters who seem to have lived about four different lives simultaneously. Blue Badge Guide. Pianist. Freelance writer. Former chief music critic of the Evening Standard. Secretary of the Critics’ Circle, founded in 1913.
And then there’s the wonderfully eccentric bit.
Rick developed a form of what he called “costume journalism.” As JS Bach he walked across Germany. As Mendelssohn he hiked across Scotland. As Edward Elgar he cycled across the Malvern Hills. And as Shakespeare’s clown Will Kemp he danced across East Anglia.
Only in Britain.
And perhaps only at London Walks.
It all makes weirdly perfect sense because Rick’s great gift is helping people see. Not just look. See.
One walker who admitted she didn’t really like modern art came away converted. Another called Rick “the BEST tour guide I have ever had. Period. Full stop.” A father who brought his 13-year-old son fearing the whole thing might be “over our heads” said both of them loved it.
Again and again the same refrain comes back:
“He brings the artists and their works to life.”
“The best way to avoid being overwhelmed.”
“This is the way to experience an art gallery.”
One walker said: “I suspect Rick may have emerged from the womb talking about art.”
Another called the tour “simply unmissable.”
And perhaps my favourite line of all was this:
“Bring an open mind.”
Because that, in the end, is the key to Tate Modern.
Modern art isn’t a test.
There are no marks at the end.
No invigilator materialises beside the Rothkos demanding an interpretation.
It’s an invitation.
Bring an open mind.
Learn how to look.
And perhaps, along the way, learn to know your Dali from your Dali Llama.
Twenty-six years old today.
Still young by London standards. St Paul’s probably thinks of it as an interesting adolescent. The Tower of London regards it as barely out of nappies.
But what a twenty-six years.
A dead power station reborn as one of the great cultural spaces on earth.
The ordinary made extraordinary.
And the strangeness cranked up another notch.
And on that fun note, that really fine note, that jolly note, see you tomorrow, one and all.