It would be tempting, and wholly wrong, to say that Tate Britain is now complete. The Tate has never been, and never will be, complete. Over a century, it has advanced in phases. Sometimes, the pause between phases of expansion has been quite long, sometimes very short. Not much happened, for instance, between the late 1930s - which marked the end of the Tate’s Anglo-American-designed high-classical phase - and the late 1970s, when the rectangular plan was “completed” with the somewhat anonymous modernist north-east quadrant by architects Llewellyn Davies. Then the 1980s brought high postmodern architecture in the form of the Clore Gallery extension- housing the Turners - by Sir James Stirling and Michael Wilford. Even their admirers would not claim this is their best work. The Clore was intended to be only the start of an ambitious sideways expansion programme into the site of the disused Queen Alexandra Hospital, but that was put on ice with the arrival of Nicholas Serota as director.
Serota had different ideas, and these crystallized as Tate Modern in the former Bankside power station downriver. And when Serota turned to reconsider the old Tate - now returned to its original function as a national gallery of British art - he brought in architects with whom he had worked previously at the Whitechapel Gallery. John Miller and his partner Su Rogers are most certainly not hot young international iconoclasts of the calibre of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, designers of Tate Modern.
On the contrary: they are careful, old-fashioned, somewhat academic British modernists with a proven track record of working with existing historic buildings. You might not necessarily enthuse over such projects of theirs as the revamped Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park - it is solid and workmanlike, rather than inspired - but golly-gosh architecture is just not their style. And at the Tate, they have exercised their invisible-mending skills to considerable effect. It is the very opposite architectural approach to Stirling and Wilford at the Clore Gallery. That shouted its difference: this whispers its similarity.
The first and most important aspect of their work is that the old Tate now has a much more accessible, democratic-feeling, entrance. Before, you could only get in by climbing that formidable flight of steps on the river front, passing through that overblown colonnade (just the sort of superficially impressive architecture that a late-Victorian millionaire such as sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate would be bound to love) and then be squeezed through a surprisingly tiny foyer. Or, more recently, you could take a detour through the front garden and get in via the Clore wing on the eastern side. Neither was particularly successful, since most visitors to Tate Britain come from the nearest tube station, which brings them to the north-western corner of the gallery. Where they were faced - until now - with a largely windowless stone wall, but no entrance.
