Tate

Tate is really four galleries, and its most-visited one used to make electricity. Tate Modern occupies the old Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames in London, a brick hulk with a single tall chimney, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the man behind the red telephone box. After it closed, the turbine hall that once held the generators was left as a vast empty room five storeys high, and since 2000 it has been used for enormous commissioned works — a crack running the length of the floor, a giant indoor sun of mist and light.

The institution started with sugar. Henry Tate made his money on the sugar cube, and in 1897 he paid to build a gallery for British art at Millbank, upriver, on the site of a demolished prison. That building is now Tate Britain, and it holds the Turner Bequest, the thousands of oils and watercolours J.M.W. Turner left to the nation on his death in 1851.

Between them the two London sites split the collection by era, with Tate Britain taking British art back to the 16th century and Tate Modern taking international modern and contemporary work. Two more galleries carry the name outside the capital, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives on the Cornish coast, the latter built above a beach where some of the painters it shows once worked.