Tate Modern

Tate Modern occupies the hulking brick frame of the former Bankside Power Station, a building designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott — the same architect behind the iconic red telephone box — and built in two phases between 1947 and 1963. When the station was decommissioned in 1981 after just two decades of operation, it sat empty on the South Bank for nearly two decades. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won the international competition to convert it in 1994, and their radical decision to preserve the industrial skeleton — the cavernous Turbine Hall, the central chimney stack rising 99 metres — defined the character of the gallery that opened to the public on 11 May 2000. A second building, the pyramid-shaped Switch House (later renamed the Blavatnik Building), was added in 2016, increasing the gallery's exhibition space by 60 percent.

The collection spans art from 1900 to the present day and holds works by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Salvador Dalí, Louise Bourgeois, and Joseph Beuys, among thousands of others. Rothko's Seagram Murals — a series of dark, brooding canvases the American painter originally intended for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York before withdrawing them in protest — occupy a dedicated room and are considered one of the great hanging experiences in any museum in the world. The gallery draws around 6 million visitors per year, making it the most visited modern art museum in the world and the fourth most visited art museum overall.

The Turbine Hall, measuring 155 metres long and 35 metres high, is the gallery's most theatrical space. Since 2000, it has hosted the annual Unilever Series (later the Hyundai Commission), a programme of site-specific installations by major international artists. Highlights have included Louise Bourgeois's towering steel spider sculpture Maman in 2000, Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun The Weather Project in 2003 — which drew 2.1 million visitors over five months — and Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds in 2010, a field of 100 million hand-crafted porcelain seeds made by 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen, China.

Admission to the permanent collection is free, though ticketed exhibitions are staged regularly in the upper galleries. The Blavatnik Building's top-floor viewing terrace offers an unobstructed panorama across the Thames toward St Paul's Cathedral — a view that is itself free of charge. The museum is a short walk across the Millennium Bridge from the City of London, or reachable via Southwark or Blackfriars Underground stations. Allow a minimum of two hours; the permanent collection alone spans ten floors and multiple dedicated suites.