Moments from Tate Modern

Before it was a museum, it was Bankside Power Station, a hulking brick electricity plant designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (who also designed London's red telephone boxes) and decommissioned in 1981. Herzog & de Meuron converted it with a light touch, keeping the industrial bones largely intact, and when it opened in 2000 the single most dramatic move was leaving the old turbine hall almost entirely empty: a cathedral-scale void, 35 meters high, that the museum now fills with a rotating series of massive site-specific commissions, Olafur Eliasson's giant glowing sun, Ai Weiwei's carpet of a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, Doris Salcedo's floor-length crack.

General admission to the permanent collection is free, which makes Tate Modern one of the easiest major museums in the world to visit in short, repeated bursts rather than one exhausting marathon. The Blavatnik Building, a twisting brick extension added in 2016, holds more of the contemporary and performance-oriented work and has a free viewing terrace on its top floor with one of the better skyline views in London, looking straight across the Thames to St Paul's. Check what's currently installed in the Turbine Hall before you go, it changes roughly every six to nine months and is usually the single most photographed thing in the building, for good reason.