Tate Modern aka: Tate Modern Museum, Tate Modern Gallery

The Tate Modern is utterly fantastic! The best part is the Turbine Hall-the huge hall which usually has some kind of installation art piece, often interactive. I’ve seen some really amazing mind-blowing art there-and the Turbine Hall is free! The rest of the museum may or may not be worth it, depending on your tastes in art, but if you’re in London, at least pop your head into the Turbine Hall to see what’s on.

Where: United Kingdom, London
Bankside, London SE1, directions on website
Cost: Free, suggested £3 donation
Website: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 10AM to 6PM and Friday through Saturday 10AM to 10PM
How to get there: London Underground, Southwark and Blackfriars stops are closest
When visited: Fall 2008

Is this a must see site? I’m not sure. I would say the biggest question you have to answer is, “Do my children like modern art?” My daughter tolerates the gallery portions of modern art. I can look around a gallery and immediately determine which two or three pieces I want to look at more closely. Strangely, it almost alway seems to be “name” artists.

Anyway, the real reason to bring the family here is for the turbine hall, unless they love Rothko or Bacon. It’s an amazing space. Since the Tate Modern used to be a power plant—right in the middle of London, crazy, I know—the main space is an enormous room capable of eating whatever building you live in and then a few more. It’s huge. A rotating display is featured there. My daughter loved the one we saw: ranks of yellow and blue bunk beds. She had to touch all of them. Truly an overwhelming space to contemplate art, certainly unique to my experience.

There are baby changing facilities in several locations of the Tate Modern. For those with strollers, there is a bank of elevators, though if busy the wait might be fairly long.

If it weren’t for its central London location I doubt we would have gone there, but I’m glad we did. The turbine hall is worth a visit, and you can cross the Thames on the Millenium Bridge when you’re done.

Earlier this year, there was an art installation in the Turbine Hall called Shibboleth. It looked as though, somehow, the artist had managed to gouge open the floor to create a giant 548ft long fissure which ran throughout the hall and was up to 3ft deep in places.

I remember reading about it in the paper (it became infamous because some visitors actually fell down into the crack) and wondering how on earth it had been created. You can see pictures of the crack and the secret behind its creation here

When I visited recently, the installation was long gone but traces of it remain. They decided to fill in the crack with concrete, so you can still see where it used to snake across the floor. Even filled in, I thought that the scale of it was impressive and wished that I had gone to see it earlier.

great collection

There’s always something in the turbine hall to draw you in, and once you’re inside, the rest wont be a disappointment.

Go there, spend an afternoon, take your time.

Then go there again, and again…