Tudor Galleries

The new Tudor galleries are interesting, the paintings set against walls unusually lined with charcoal-grey fabric, the faces highlighted by tiny ceiling-mounted halogen spotlights. It's all deliberately dark and tomb-like. The spaces - a smallish room for the smaller early Tudor portraits, followed by a "long gallery" of Elizabethan dimensions for the larger, later paintings - including the grand portraits of Elizabeth 1, the original Gloriana.

While the Tudor galleries are just the right side of claustrophobia, the Balcony Gallery below does the other thing. It is drenched with light, overlooks the big entrance space through its angled walls, is just the right side of agoraphobia. The young Paul McCartney at one end balances Lord Mountbatten (near Margaret Thatcher, in the statesperson section) at the other. Look hard and you'll find Princess Diana here, a photo in casual mode. She's flanked by pop stars and entertainers, which presumably is a comment of some kind. It is noticeable that while the Sixties and Eighties sections have very distinct looks to them, the Seventies - from Ted Heath to the Sex Pistols by way of the teenage Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons - do not. Photographically at least, it was the decade that style forgot.

Balcony Gallery: hung from the Tudor Gallery above

The National Portrait Gallery extension (named The Ondaatje Wing) is a building, not a piece of interior design. Despite that, it is a building with no outside walls, and only that rooftop restaurant projecting, almost invisibly, into the outside world. It is the most elementally modern thing that Dixon and Jones - who once upon a time were thought to be fussy post-modernists - have done for years. Some slightly odd curatorial decisions ae apparent: should the interactive gallery with its computers take such pride of place, first level up from the new courtyard, for instance? And should that new entrance space be left so whitely empty of art, such a huge contrast to the familiar clutter of the rest of the place? But these are minor cavils. The NPG has been, as the lad Beckham would doubtless say, well sorted.