- It is located on the south bank of the River Thames in London. The building was originally the Bankside Power Station.
- The architect of the power station was Giles Gilbert Scott, who is also famous for designing Britain's red Phone boxes. The architects for its conversion into an art gallery were Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. They are also famous for designing the Beijing National Stadium or “Bird’s Nest”.
- The conversion cost £134 million and took four and a half years.
- The building is made up of 4.2million bricks, and is comparable in size to Westminster Abbey. The chimney is 99m (325 ft) tall. The chimney was specifically built to be lower than the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. An interesting fact about the chimney is that, since about 2004, it has been a favourite perch for peregrine falcons. The resident pair of falcons have been nicknamed Amy and Sheldon. They raised three chicks in 2016.
- Traditionally, galleries arrange their collections in chronological order. Tate Modern is different - it arranges its collection by the theme of the works. The arrangement of the works and the themes change frequently.
- The main galleries stand in what used to be the boiler house of the power station. There is also a vast, 26m high room where the power station's turbines used to be - Turbine Hall. Larger scale, temporary artworks are housed in here. These have included: Embankment, by Rachel Whiteread, which consisted of 14,000 polyethylene boxes piled up to look like mountain peaks - said to have been inspired by scenes from the films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Citizen Kane; Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei, in which the floor was covered with thousands of clay sunflower seeds. Initially, people would walk on them and play with them, but then health and safety put an end to that when they discovered the seeds produced potentially harmful dust; Test Site, which was a series of metal slides -visitors could slide down the slides of the installation free, but had to have timed tickets for the higher ones which reached as high as the fifth floor; The weather project by Olafur Eliasson, which used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air and had a circular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light to look like the sun. A huge mirror on the ceiling meant people could look at themselves walking around, or, indeed, lying on the ground and forming rude words with their bodies; and Shibboleth, by Doris Salcedo, which was basically a big crack in the floor. You can still see where it was filled in with cement at the end of the exhibition in 2007.
- In the first year of its opening, 5.25 million visitors passed through the doors. It soon became clear it would have to be made bigger. First, vast underground tanks, once used for storing oil, were converted into a display spaces for live performance art and utility space, known as The Tanks. A further extension, initially known as the Switch House, but re-named the Blavatnik Building, after Anglo-Ukrainian billionaire Sir Leonard Blavatnik, who contributed a large chunk of the £260m cost of the extension, opened in 2017.
- Eyesight not so good? There are a couple of sonic trails visitors can follow, created by sound artists. There are two to choose from: Trace by Caleb Madden and A Wild Chase by Emiliano Zelada.
- There's a Drawing Bar which consists of a digital sketch pad. People as young as three years old can create doodles on it which are them projected onto a gallery wall. So want to do that!
- Episodes of Red Dwarf and the films Judge Dredd and Bridget Jones’s Diary used Tate Modern as a location.
More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories.
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.
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