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1The 1970s and 1980s made it difficult to imagine that London would soon become the successor to Paris and New York as the centre of the international art world, and that its docks, still scarred from the Blitz and derelict from the demise of industry, would soon form part of what is considered central London. Southwark, then, was far from its present state and could not yet boast a tube station, a footbridge linking it to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, a scenic walk along the river and swanky shops and apartments. The Tate Gallery was still a single entity in Pimlico housing two collections, one of British art, the other of modern foreign painting, pointing to the fact that the very idea of a collection of contemporary British art was still deemed eccentric. A large power station at Bankside was still to be decommissioned. Yet, when the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, rebranded in 1999 as Tate Modern, opened in 2000, it instantly became one of the world’s most popular museums of modern and contemporary art, exceeding all expectations in terms of visitors from the very first year. In Towards Tate Modern, Caroline Donnellan charts the long history of a project which led to the opening of a museum which would transform London but also the cultural scene of the whole country. While she focuses mostly on the decade that preceded, she also identifies the roots of the project in the 1917 gift to the National Gallery of British Art of the Hugh Lane Bequest, a modern foreign collection. Tate Modern was therefore in fact a century in the making.

2By working across the fields of policy studies, museum studies and urban studies, and by providing the elements of context for its emergence, Donnellan identifies Tate Modern as a quintessentially British public museum and a pioneering hybrid model engaging with both public policy and support, private giving, and the market. In a context in which Britain has tried to nurture cultural democracy in its own specific way, Tate Modern has appeared not simply as a popular new museum, but, and this is central to Donnellan’s demonstration, as a new public forum.

3The book is divided into five chapters which focus, first on the city’s and the government’s plans for the new museum (1. Past, present and future—government and city), then on the new style of governance ushered in by Nicholas Serota when he was appointed at the head of the Tate Gallery in 1988, both for his art expertise and his fundraising skills, in order to create a new identity for the museum in line with Thatcher’s regeneration policy and support for sponsorship, and with New Labour’s continued focus on regeneration and cultural dynamism (2. Defining the vision). The third part presents the success of the rebranded Tate from 1999, a success owed mostly to the agency of Tate itself, at a time when the Millennium Dome, which had been the main focus of the Labour government’s attention, was heading for spectacular failure (3. Funding and branding). The third part is devoted to the decision not to appoint an architect directly, but to introduce an architectural competition for the first time. This aligned Britain with its European counterparts and inaugurated a new competitive edge for all public commissions. A decision was made to transform an old power station, which was not a listed building, rather than create a completely new building, thus bearing witness to the country’s obsession with its industrial heritage (4. Competition and building). Finally, a fifth chapter makes an account of the successful inauguration of the new landmark, but also the new paradigm it then set for the future role of the public museum and gallery in Britain and beyond (5. Opening Tate Modern).

4The idea that Tate itself was largely independent in devising its vision for the new building is central to the book’s demonstration. It resulted from the fact that the government’s attention was mainly focused on the Millennium Dome, but also from the personality and previous of experience of its director, Nicolas Serota. The 1987 Conservative Manifesto had demanded more targeted funding for all public, soon semi-public, institutions. Serota was therefore hired as the new director because of his skills in project management and fund sourcing. He was responsible for finding Tate’s main new sponsor BP, and for introducing a new business-style branding strategy. This was a more corporate approach indeed, but then British museums and galleries had always attracted contributions from the business sector. Tate itself originated in the donation of sugar magnate Henry Tate: the book explains how The National Gallery of British Art was first only popularly known as the Tate Gallery, after its patron, before the informal tag stuck. The reverse now seems to be true where the Tate’s new extension, named after its main patron Len Blavatnik, is still called the Switch by many.

5Tate Modern did not emerge in a vacuum: London was recasting its role as a service-based city and the context was one in which the creative and cultural sectors were outlined as playing a major economic role. New Labour scrapped the entrance fees Thatcher had imposed, but this was in fact to continue projecting the museum onto the market place (an interesting anecdote—the book is full of such interesting details—details disagreements over the size of the bookshop (95)). Almost paradoxically, a context of reduced public funding was also one in which there was more pressure to deliver. The cultural tourism market was now being linked to the emergence of the creative industries and becoming part of the public agenda. The centrality of the Museums and Galleries Act of 1992 in the whole phenomenon is stressed by Donnellan. The Act gave museums the status of corporations and appeared in the wider context of deregulation initiated by the Tory government after the election of Thatcher in 1979. Yet, remarkably, there was one field which became more regulated, that of urban planning. The 1987 Action for Cities: Building on Initiative plan followed up on Urban Development and Urban Regeneration Grants to counter the continuing decaying of London and of most post-industrial cities. The site chosen for Tate Modern in Southwark indeed links the creation of the new museum to the more general regeneration of the riverside.

6Connected to these questions of funding and public investment, the publicness of the new building is also addressed: Tate Modern is presented as a new public space which shapes new modes of inclusions. The 17th century state funded British museum had been public and free—but in fact only advertised by letters and closed at the week-end, therefore already pointing to different interpretations of publicness. The specific status as an independent institution granted to Tate in the 1954 National and Tate Gallery Act was followed by the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act which handed over its governance to a board of trustees. These political decisions point to a very specific, very British form of publicness. For Donnellan, this finds a culmination in Tate Modern, whose history and operations are not coherent with a Bourdieusian reading of the museum as an engine of both bourgeois assimilation and exclusion (13). French sociologist of culture Pierre Bourdieu famously referred to an “economy of cultural goods,” claiming that inequalities in that type of economy affect people’s lives just as much as inequalities of income. Britain’s social system is still very much defined by deep-seated distinctions of class. But, it is also a hub of cultural vibrancy. It is a paradoxical society which often seems more immobile than others, and yet also more open and innovative. The notion of participation, which has been central recently to approaches both of the art itself, and how it engages its audience, and of its democratisation in art institutions and in public spaces, is central here in the way Donnellan presents Tate Modern as an inclusive museum.

7In the 1960s, the Arts Council added the objective of “access” to the original one of “excellence” which had informed it upon its creation just after the war—and before Chris Smith made the motto fourfold in 1998 by prolonging it with “education and economic value”—making the emancipatory value of art a national political concern. Without making it a central concept, class is therefore still operative in this discussion of Tate Modern as a project which can be seen as the ultimate case study and triumph of a specifically British approach of art and culture.

8The question of inclusion also has to do with the new thematic display Nicolas Serota introduced (instead of a chronological one). This choice has been explained by the curator’s new approach to the museum: audience-focused rather than collection-focused, but also by the gaps in an uneven collection (the works of the YBAs, for example, had been bought in bulk by Charles Saatchi early on in the late eighties not leaving much choice to the Tate).

9Britain came quite late to the institutionalisation of contemporary art—the book explains how Peggy Guggenheim had planned for a Museum of Modern Art in London in 1939, but that this was put on hold because of the war, with a project to maybe turn it into a “room at the Tate”. Also, the “Bricks” scandal in 1976 had tainted the country’s approach to contemporary art when the tabloid press revealed the price paid for Carl Andre’s minimalist work (106). In 2000, Tate Modern operated a complete change in attitude, and it is the origin for this change of paradigm which Towards Tate Modern charts—while this history had already been told in the 2000 Channel 4 series, Power into art, this was done without the necessary hindsight to take stock of the museum’s spectacular success. While it will maybe be a bit dry for art lovers who will not find a discussion of the Tate collections, Towards Tate Modern makes for a fascinating read and will prove an essential book for anyone interested in London, in cultural policies and in tourism and urban studies, as they will be captivated by the many episodes which led to the creation of a new museum as much as to new forms of engagement with contemporary art.