Tate Modern, badly overcrowded, has built itself a £260 million extension to spread everyone about the place more. This means that there are more galleries and other big rooms for various modish activities — 60 per cent more space, they say. It opens on 17 June with a total rehang throughout. But having been shown round the place, I’ve become transfixed by the lifts.
When it opened in 2000 they never expected nearly five million visitors a year — which is well down on its 2014 Matisse-driven peak of nearly six million, but still twice as many as it was designed for. So when they called back Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron to extend the gallery that brought them fame, moving people around better was high on their to-do list.
When you enter the perforated-brick ziggurat of the new ten-storey extension, therefore, what you find inside is an impressively huge bank of lifts, worthy of one of the mega-lobbies at Canary Wharf.
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