The parallels with Tate Modern are inescapable. In fact, Baltic was conceived as a project even before Tate Modern was, back in the early 1990s. Young architect Dominic Williams won the design competition in 1994, but funding delays meant that London stole a march. Still: here’s a big old industrial barn of a place, on the poorer Gateshead side of the river, now joined to the wealthier north bank - Newcastle - by a high-design bridge that is a destination in itself. Sounds familiar? Indeed: down south, Norman Foster’s formerly wobbly Millennium Bridge lands right by Tate Modern, connecting the rich City of London to poor but culturally ambitious Southwark. The game’s the same.

When you consider that Baltic will in a couple of years be joined by a Norman Foster concert hall complex, now fast rising on the steep banks of the Tyne close by, and that hotels and apartments are springing up as well, you get the picture. This is to be the equivalent of London’s Bankside and the South Bank Centre rolled into one, courtesy of the Arts Council Lottery fund. The big difference is this: The Tate has an art collection. Baltic does not. It’s less a Tate, more a Hayward Gallery: big empty spaces destined to be filled with ever-changing displays.

And this makes it a big gamble, because Baltic is very large. That’s the glory and the tyranny of such old buildings. What they give you is space beyond your wildest dreams. Were you to set out to build a contemporary art space from scratch in Gateshead, you wouldn’t for a moment consider making it so big. So we are in uncharted waters here. As it turned out, Baltic was extremely difficult to convert, since its interior consisted of a structural honeycomb of square concrete silos, and these were holding the whole thing up. But once this was done, the empty space so created was awe-inspiring. In 1999 this led to the first big temporary art installation that put Baltic on the map: Anish Kapoor filled the whole space with an extraordinary arrangement of shiny red tensile fabric, making a shape oddly reminiscent of a giant abstracted sewing machine, and called it "Tarantara". One of the best things Kapoor has ever done, this helped win him the commission for this year’s forthcoming Unilever-sponsored installation in the turbine hall of Tate Modern. Once again, the north had the idea first.