Admission to the collection displays is free, and in September 2026 the government ruled out changing that, rejecting a recommendation that overseas visitors be charged for entry to the national museums. The top floor is a subtler matter. The viewing level that opened with the 2016 extension was closed after the owners of the flats that overlook it won in the Supreme Court, and has been open again since 2023 as Level 10 — a place to get a drink rather than a viewpoint, and no longer advertised as one.
The power station
There had been a power station on the site since 1891. The building that stands there now is Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's, put up in two phases, 1947 to 1952 and 1958 to 1963: a steel frame with a reinforced concrete roof, clad in more than four million bricks. It was oil-fired, not coal-fired — the post-war scheme that was approved had switched fuel — and the single chimney was Scott's revision of a design that had called for two. It stands about ninety-nine metres, and it was kept deliberately lower than the dome of St Paul's Cathedral on the opposite bank.
Scott is an unexpectedly familiar architect to have left a building here. The same hand produced Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, the red telephone box, and the House of Commons Chamber as it was rebuilt after the war.
Generation stopped in 1981, the gallery's own account giving 31 October and blaming the price of oil.
The building nobody would protect
A great deal of writing about the gallery describes the power station as a listed building. It is not, and it never has been. Listing was asked for and refused more than once — the Twentieth Century Society requested it in 1987 and was refused again in 1992 — and in 1993 the building was granted a certificate of immunity from listing, which is the formal statement that it would not be protected. Seven years later it opened as one of the most visited buildings in the country.
A certificate of immunity runs for five years, so the 1993 one has long since lapsed. The position today is simply that the building carries no statutory listing at all.
The conversion
The decision to create a separate gallery for modern art was announced in December 1992, and Bankside was named as the site on 28 April 1994. A competition launched that July drew 148 entries, shortlisted to six, and Herzog and de Meuron were announced as the winners in January 1995.
The conversion cost £134 million, of which the Millennium Commission gave fifty million, English Partnerships twelve million towards the site, and Arts Council England a little over six million for one floor. Machinery and several outbuildings were stripped out in 1995, leaving a brick shell held up by a steel skeleton; a new steel framework was then built inside the original walls to carry seven gallery floors and to support the brickwork. The switch house at the southern end stayed in service as an electricity substation, which is the reason the later extension had to go south rather than anywhere more convenient.
On the opening, the gallery's own pages give two different dates without explaining the difference. Both are right: it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 11 May 2000 and opened to the public on 12 May.
The Turbine Hall
The hall is thirty-five metres high and a hundred and fifty-two metres long on the gallery's own figure. No authoritative width is published, and the larger dimensions in circulation — a hundred and sixty metres by fifty-four — are for the Turbine Hall and the boiler house together rather than the hall alone.
Its commissioned works have had three distinct periods. The Unilever Series ran from the day the gallery opened to 28 October 2012, when Unilever ended a twelve-year sponsorship worth £4.4 million. Then came two years with no named commission at all, in 2013 and 2014. Hyundai Motor's partnership was announced in January 2014 — at the time the longest initial corporate commitment in the gallery's history — the Hyundai Commission began in the autumn of 2015, and in March 2025 the arrangement was extended by a decade, to 2036.
One work is installed each year, running roughly from October to the following April, so what is in the hall depends entirely on when the visit falls. The commission installed for the 2026 and 2027 season is Tarek Atoui's Hold, from 13 October 2026 to 11 April 2027, free to see, with a series of free but ticketed performances alongside it.
The Blavatnik Building, and the Tanks
The extension opened to the public on 17 June 2016, the day after three thousand schoolchildren had been let in ahead of everyone else. It cost £260 million, rises ten storeys, increased the display space by about sixty per cent, and is Herzog and de Meuron's again.
It opened under the name the Switch House, taken from the substation it stands beside, and was renamed the Blavatnik Building in May 2017 after a donation reported at more than fifty million pounds. Beneath it are the Tanks, the power station's underground oil stores, which opened as galleries on 18 July 2012, shut that October while the tower above them was built, and reopened with the extension.
Level 10, and the case that changed it
The viewing level opened with the extension: the top floor, a view through three hundred and sixty degrees, free to enter, and room for about three hundred people at once. It was drawing between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand visitors a year against roughly five and a half million for the gallery as a whole. The flats of Neo Bankside stand about thirty-four metres away, and residents on the thirteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first floors brought a claim in nuisance.
They won. Fearn and others v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery was decided by the Supreme Court on 1 February 2023, the appeal allowed by three to two with Lord Leggatt giving the lead judgment. What the court did not do, and what is widely assumed, is order the viewing level shut: it decided the question of liability and sent the question of remedy back to the High Court.
The floor reopened on 4 September 2023 as Level 10, open on three sides with the south side — the side facing the flats — barriered off and signed against photography. The proceedings then ended in October 2023 by agreement rather than by injunction or damages: the gallery undertook not to operate the floor in a way that allowed intrusive viewing or photography of the flats, and the claimants took no damages at all.
What is there now is reached by lift from the lower floors and serves drinks and food. The change in how it is described is as telling as anything: the gallery's own listing for Level 10 no longer uses the words viewing level, viewing gallery or terrace, and its main visitor information does not mention Level 10 at all. Whether the south side is still barriered is not published anywhere, and the three-sides arrangement is documented only as far as the autumn of 2023, so it is worth treating as a café with a view rather than a view with a café.
The collection, and the twenty-fifth anniversary
The collection displays are free and the temporary exhibitions are ticketed, which is the arrangement across the national museums. The original boiler house, which holds most of the collection floors, is now the Natalie Bell Building — renamed for a community activist in the surrounding part of south London as part of Tania Bruguera's 2018 commission, intended to last a year, and made permanent in 2019.
The twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025 is often described as a rehang. It was not, and the gallery's own annual report declines to give it a name: what happened was a trail of twenty-five works placed around the building, which brought Louise Bourgeois's Maman back into the Turbine Hall for the first time in twenty-five years and returned Rothko's Seagram murals and Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to view, alongside two free exhibitions.
Admission, and the decision of September 2026
Free entry to the standing collections of the fifteen museums sponsored by the culture department was confirmed in September 2026, when the Culture Secretary rejected a review's recommendation that overseas visitors be charged, and described the collections as free, forever, for everyone to access. The reason this is worth stating plainly is that the proposal was live for several months beforehand, so anything published between roughly May and September 2026 may say the opposite.
Opening is longer on Friday and Saturday evenings than on other days, a change made in September 2025. The hours themselves are better checked than printed, because the gallery's own pages have given more than one set for Level 10.
Who runs it
Both of the relevant posts are at present held on an interim basis, which is unusual enough to be worth saying. Karin Hindsbo, Director of Tate Modern since 2023, has been Interim Director of Tate since Maria Balshaw stepped down in the spring of 2026 after nine years; Catherine Wood, who joined in 2002, is Interim Director of Tate Modern. Jessica Morgan, a curator at Tate Modern between 2010 and 2014, was appointed Director of Tate in July 2026 and takes up the post on 1 January 2027.
How many people come, and one claim to avoid
The gallery's own accounts record 4,538,061 visits in the year to March 2026, against 4,432,890 the year before. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, counting the calendar year 2025, gives 4,514,266 and ranks it fourth in the United Kingdom, behind the Natural History Museum, the British Museum and Windsor Great Park. The two figures are routinely quoted against each other as though they disagreed; they cover different twelve-month periods.
The description of Tate Modern as the most visited gallery of modern art in the world turns up constantly and is supported by nothing official — not by the gallery, not by the government, and not by the association, which counts attractions in the United Kingdom only. It is better left alone.
Getting there
The gallery stands on Bankside, between Shakespeare's Globe and Blackfriars Bridge, with the Millennium Bridge running from its north door across to St Paul's. Southwark and Blackfriars are the nearest stations, and London Bridge is a walk along the river.
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