Tate Britain

The front door is shut

The Millbank entrance — the columned portico at the top of the steps, and the face of the building in every photograph of it — closed in early May 2026 and is to stay closed until 2027. The way in is the Manton Entrance on Atterbury Street, round the side.

What is being built in front of it is the Clore Garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith with a new classroom by Feilden Fowles. Work began in the spring of 2026, planting followed later in the year, and the garden is due to open in 2027; a version of it was shown at the Chelsea Flower Show in May 2026, and a head gardener's post has been funded for three years. The gallery stays open throughout.

Two cautions. Tate's own annual report calls it the Tate Britain Garden while its press release and its visitor pages call it the Clore Garden, so both names are in circulation for one thing. And Tate's page for the Clore Gallery still offers the steps from Millbank as a way in, which it is not — the visitor page is the one to trust.

Four names, and an order that gets reversed

The gallery opened as the National Gallery of British Art, and was being called the Tate Gallery almost at once. The official names ran: National Gallery of British Art from 1897; National Gallery, Millbank from 1920; and Tate Gallery only from October 1932, when the trustees formally adopted the name the public had used for thirty-five years. In 2000 the organisation as a whole became Tate, and the building at Millbank was relaunched as Tate Britain.

The usual telling has it renamed when Tate Modern opened. The order is the other way round. Tate Britain opened under its new name on 24 March 2000; Tate Modern opened on 12 May — seven weeks later. Both followed from a decision taken in 1992 to divide the displays of the collection between two sites in London. No instrument renaming the gallery could be found; the relaunch date is what the record gives.

Henry Tate, and the question about his money

Henry Tate, 1819 to 1899, was a sugar merchant whose firms later combined with Abram Lyle's. He wrote to the National Gallery offering his collection on 23 October 1889, and his deed of gift of 6 November 1894 gave sixty-five paintings — Millais's Ophelia and Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott among them, the collection valued at about seventy-five thousand pounds — and £80,000 towards the cost of the building, on condition that a gallery devoted to British art be built to hold it. He paid for the extension of 1898 as well, was made a baronet that year, and died on 5 December 1899, days after that extension opened.

The claim that the gallery was built on slavery money needs stating carefully, because the careless version is wrong and the careful version is worse. In August 2019 Tate published a statement prepared with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London, whose researchers it had invited to share their analysis. On the direct question: neither Henry Tate nor Abram Lyle was a slave-owner or a slave-trader, no evidence was found of slave-ownership in their families or among their business partners, and Tate was fourteen when the Act of 1833 was passed.

Tate did not stop there, and the rest of its own statement is the part that gets left out. The sugar industry the firms were built on was founded on slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; precursor businesses were tied to slave-grown sugar; sugar bought after abolition came from estates established under slavery and then worked by wage and indentured labour; and some items in the collection were given by, or are linked to, slave-owners and people whose wealth derived from slavery. The conclusion Tate draws is its own: that it is not possible to separate the Tate galleries from the history of colonial slavery. The statement carries no later date and has not been revised.

The building, and what was added when

The architect was Sidney R. J. Smith, with Higgs and Hill building from 1893, on the site of Thomas Hardwick's Millbank Penitentiary. The Prince of Wales opened it ceremonially on 21 July 1897, and it opened to the public on 16 August — so a page giving only the July date is describing a ceremony, and one that says the public came in on 21 July is wrong.

It is listed Grade II*, list entry 1222913, first listed on 5 February 1970, and the listing covers the interior: the marble-clad vestibule, the domed octagonal hall, stained glass by E. Bossanyi of 1938 to 1941, and the Rex Whistler mural in the basement restaurant, which is named in the statutory description. The Grade I attribution that circulates is wrong, and it is worth knowing where it came from — not from tourist copy but from a newspaper of record reporting the trustees' advice in 2020, which is why it reads as authoritative.

The additions, in order: the 1898 extension paid for by Henry Tate, nine rooms and a sculpture hall; the Turner wing by W. H. Romaine-Walker, begun in August 1908 and opened to the public on 18 July 1910; the Modern Foreign and Sargent galleries in 1926; the Duveen Galleries, opened by George VI on 29 June 1937, by John Russell Pope with Romaine Walker and Jenkins, and the first public galleries in England designed for sculpture; the North East Quadrant by Richard Llewellyn-Davies, opened on 24 May 1979; and the Centenary Development of 1997 by John Miller and Partners, funded by Sir Edwin Manton, which created the Atterbury Street entrance now carrying all the traffic.

The most recent work is Caruso St John's, appointed in 2007, the first phase running to 2013 at a budget of £45 million. Nine galleries in the oldest southern part of the building were rebuilt, a spiral staircase was put into the domed Rotunda down to the lower level, and the circular Rotunda balcony, closed to visitors since the 1920s, was brought back into use. The phase opened to the public in May 2013; Tate's own launch was that November, which is why both years appear.

The prison underneath

Millbank Prison stood here first — a reformatory from 1816, and after 1842 a place where convicts were held awaiting transportation to Australia. It closed in 1890 and was demolished about 1892, leaving vaults beneath the gallery that were never fully filled in.

There is a marker, and it is genuine. In Riverside Walk Gardens on the river side of Millbank stands a large cylindrical granite buttress with a bronze plaque, put up by the London County Council in 1965. The buttress stood at the head of the river steps until 1867, and it was from those steps that prisoners sentenced to transportation embarked.

Its opening date is disputed by the official record against itself. The plaque gives 1818; English Heritage's own account of the prison, and Tate's, give 1816. Both agree on 1890 for the closure.

Turner, and a will that was not carried out

Turner died in December 1851, and relatives he had cut out contested the will on the grounds that he had been of unsound mind. A Court of Chancery compromise in 1856 split the financial assets among the family and passed the works "by his hand" to the nation; the National Gallery's trustees took legal possession on 25 September 1856.

What is usually left out is what the will had actually been for. Turner directed the bulk of his estate, something like £140,000, to the building of almshouses for indigent male English landscape painters at Twickenham. They were never built. The charitable intention was argued to be illegal and the money went to the relatives instead. A codicil of 1848 asked that his finished pictures be kept together in a room at the National Gallery, with two of his own hung beside two Claudes; a House of Lords inquiry upheld the request in 1861, the pairing was honoured only intermittently, it lapsed between the wars and was not resumed afterwards, and the collection was never in fact kept together there. The bulk of it came to Millbank in 1910.

The size of the bequest is given in round figures that Tate's own scholarship complicates. The public figure, used by Tate and by the National Gallery alike, is about three hundred oil paintings and thirty thousand works on paper, with three hundred sketchbooks. Against that: only about a hundred of the oils were finished; the schedule of 1856 listed 19,049 drawings and sketches, with other early counts of 19,331 and 19,723; Finberg's inventory of 1909 gave 19,743; and nearly thirty-two thousand are recorded under Tate accession numbers today. Tate attributes the spread to counting method — sheets against drawings, two-sided and folded sheets — and to works by other hands wrongly included. Eleven sketchbooks were missed by the early inventories, and the National Gallery recorded in 1905 that more than a hundred and fifty sketchbooks had been taken apart.

The Clore Gallery was built to hold it, by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, funded by the Clore Foundation in memory of Sir Charles Clore with government money alongside. Its foundation plaque was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on 19 April 1983 and it was opened by the Queen on 1 April 1987; Historic England dates the construction to 1984 and 1985, which is why two dates circulate. It is not a fixed hang — the displays change, works on paper appear in temporary displays in a room of their own, and Turner is shown elsewhere in the building too.

The superlatives attached to the Turner holdings are all Tate's own — the largest collection of his paintings in the world, the largest free display of them — and nothing independent corroborates either. They are at least mechanically plausible, the bequest being a single legally defined body of work held in one place.

The flood of 1928

On the night of 6 and 7 January 1928 the Thames burst its banks at Lambeth, took down about fifty metres of parapet wall, and sent water into the lower ground floor galleries and the basement. It also came up through the gallery floor, out of vaults left unfilled when the prison was demolished in 1892. Across London fourteen people were killed and an estimated four thousand made homeless.

The damage figure usually quoted is the wrong one. Eighteen works were damaged beyond repair — seventeen on the contemporary report to the trustees — while 226 oil paintings were badly damaged and sixty-seven slightly. So the 226 that gets repeated as a destruction figure is a damage figure.

Two things survived better than they should have. The Turner works on paper stored below were saturated and covered in mud, but the colours did not run; blotting paper used in the rescue picked up offsets from them, and the blotters were kept as a record. And the Whistler mural sat under eight feet of flood water and was undamaged.

The room that stopped being a restaurant

Rex Whistler's mural The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats — dated 1926 to 1927 on Tate's current page and 1927 by its press office — runs round what was the basement restaurant. Among its figures, each only a few inches high, are two Black children, probably depicted as enslaved, and caricatured Chinese figures.

The sequence: from about 2018 Tate added interpretation text after complaints, and later judged that text inadequate. In March 2020 the restaurant closed for the pandemic and did not reopen with the rest of the building. Late in 2020 Tate's ethics committee, chaired by the then trustee Moya Greene, reported to the board that its members were "unequivocal in their view that the imagery of the work is offensive", and added that using the room as a restaurant compounded the offence. The trustees were advised that the mural should not be altered or removed, because it forms part of a listed interior — it is named in the statutory list description, which is the constraint doing the work here.

What Tate did instead was commission a reply. On 11 March 2024 it announced Keith Piper's Viva Voce, the first work commissioned in response to the mural: a two-screen film suspended in the room, imagining a conversation between Whistler and an invented academic who challenges the racist imagery. It opened to the public on 12 March 2024.

So the room is neither closed nor a restaurant. It is an open, free display on the lower floor near the Rotunda staircase, showing the film alongside the mural. Whether the restaurant will ever reopen has never been published, and anything asserting that it will not is inference rather than a Tate decision.

The collection, and the superlative Tate does not make

The holdings are 77,822 works of art on Tate's most recent reported figure, with more than a million items in the archive beyond that; its public pages give "over 70,000 artworks" covering 1500 to the present.

On the claim most often attached to the place: Tate's collection page uses no superlative at all, describing it simply as the national collection of British art. The phrase in circulation — the world's greatest collection of British art — comes from Tate's own press release of February 2023 and was recycled verbatim by the art press, which is how it spread. Note the word: Tate says greatest, not largest, and "largest" appears in its wording only about Turner. Nothing independent verifies either, and the "greatest" version cannot be tested at all.

The current hang dates from that release. Announced on 15 February 2023 and opened on 23 May 2023, it put out more than eight hundred works by more than three hundred and fifty artists, and it has no name — Tate called it a complete rehang and nothing more, so any branded title given to it elsewhere is not Tate's. It is still the hang in place: the four free collection displays, covering historic and early modern British art, modern and contemporary British art, Turner, and works sited around the building, are all listed as ongoing. The Tate Britain Commission fills the Duveen Galleries on a cycle, and Art Now runs through the year.

Two visitor figures are in circulation and they point in opposite directions, because they measure different years. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions counted 1,149,325 visits in the calendar year 2025, ranking Tate Britain thirtieth in the United Kingdom and down six per cent; Tate's own accounts give 1,340,008 for the year to 31 March 2026, up on the year before. Neither source reconciles with the other, and both can be true of their own window.

On the finances, the year to March 2026 showed grant-in-aid of £58.4 million against £53.9 million the year before, and an operating surplus of about £3 million where the previous year had an operating deficit of about £5 million. A workforce reduction to clear the deficit left by the pandemic was made through unfilled vacancies and voluntary departures rather than compulsory redundancy. A Tate-wide pay dispute brought seven days of strikes in November 2025; a second round planned for February 2026 was suspended and then dropped after an improved offer took the award to 3.6 per cent, with commitments carried into the following pay round that the union has said it will press.

The Turner Prize is somewhere else

The prize is administered by Tate and is strongly associated with this building, and it has not been held here for three announced years running. 2025 was at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, won by Nnena Kalu. 2026 is at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, running from 26 September 2026 to 29 March 2027, with the winner announced on 10 December 2026. 2027 goes to Tate St Ives, from 21 October 2027 to 23 January 2028.

Going off site is not new — Liverpool in 2007, Derry in 2013, Glasgow in 2015, Hull in 2017 — but three consecutive years away means the prize cannot be at Millbank again before 2028.

Four galleries, and one of them is shut

Tate is four places: Liverpool from 1988, St Ives from 1993, and Modern and Britain from 2000.

Tate Liverpool has been closed since October 2023 for a transformation costed at £29.7 million, originally planned as a two-year project and now running to roughly twice that. Reopening has been put at spring 2027 but has not been announced, and twelve million pounds of government support was reported in June 2025. So accounts that describe four open Tate galleries have been wrong for three years.

Visiting

Admission to the collection displays is free.

The Manton Entrance on Atterbury Street is step-free, by a sloped ramp with automatic doors, and it is the only way in while the Millbank portico is closed. A large lift near that entrance reaches the main floor, and a second near the Lower Rotunda serves the main floor and the members' room; floor levels are announced in all the lifts. Accessible parking is reached from John Islip Street and must be booked at least a day ahead.

The nearest station is Pimlico, on the Victoria line, about eight minutes' walk on Tate's own figure. On step-free access the honest position is that nobody states one: Pimlico is not marked step-free on the transport authority's map, and the authority's own page for the station makes no step-free statement either way. Tate names it as the nearest station and conspicuously does not call it step-free, and it routes accessible journeys to Vauxhall instead.

The Tate Boat runs between Millbank Pier and Bankside Pier, operated by Uber Boat by Thames Clippers on the RB1 service on weekdays and the RB2 at weekends, every twenty to thirty minutes while the galleries are open. Millbank Pier is not step-free at present, which Tate attributes to unplanned maintenance and for which it gives no end date; Vauxhall is again the recommended alternative.