Tate Modern

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Lonely Planet review

The public's love affair with this phenomenally successful modern art gallery shows no sign of waning. Serious art critics have occasionally swiped at its populism (eg Carl Höller's funfair-like slides, Olafur Eliasson's participatory The Weather Project , both in the vast Turbine Hall) and poked holes in its collection. But 5 million visitors make it the world's most popular contemporary art gallery, and London's most visited sight.

The critics are right in one sense, though: this 'Tate Modern effect' is really more about the building and its location than about the mostly 20th-century art inside. Leading Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won the Pritzker, architecture's most prestigious prize, for their transformation of the empty Bankside Power Station, which was built between 1947 and 1963 and decommissioned 23 years later. Leaving the building's single central chimney, adding a two-storey glass box onto the roof and using the vast Turbine Hall as a dramatic entrance space were three strokes of genius. Then, of course, there are the wonderful views of the Thames and St Paul's, particularly from the restaurant-bar on the 7th level and coffee bar on the 4th. There's also a café on the 2nd level, plus places to relax overlooking the Turbine Hall. An 11-storey glass tower extension to the southwest corner in the form of a ziggurat - a spiralling stepped pyramid - by the same architects is now under way and will be completed in 2012.

Tate Modern's permanent collection on levels 3 and 5 is now arranged by both theme and chronology. States of Flux is devoted to early-20th-century avant-garde movements, including cubism and futurism. Poetry and Dream examines surrealism through various themes and techniques. Material Gestures features European and American painting and sculpture of the 1940s and '50s. Idea and Object looks at minimalism and conceptual art from the 1960s onward.

More than 60,000 works are on constant rotation here, and the curators have at their disposal paintings by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol, as well as pieces by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Rebecca Horn, Claes Oldenburg and Auguste Rodin. Mark Rothko's famous Seagram murals have been given their own space on level 3; other familiar favourites include Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! (level 5), Jackson Pollock's Summertime: No 9A (level 3) and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (level 5)

Special exhibitions (level 4) in the past have included retrospectives on Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, August Strindberg, Nazism and 'Degenerate' Art and local 'bad boys' Gilbert & George. Audioguides, with four different tours, are available for around £2 . Free guided highlights tours depart at , noon, and daily.

The Tate Boat, painted by Damien Hirst, operates between the Bankside Pier at Tate Modern and the Millbank Pier at sister-museum Tate Britain, stopping en route at the London Eye. Services from Tate Modern depart from to daily, at 40-minute intervals .