Tate Britain Gardens

Henry Tate was originally from Lancashire and had worked in sugar refinery in Liverpool, patenting his invention to cut up sugar mechanically into cubes, after which he founded his own business in London and settled in Streatham Common at Park Hill in 1884, now Tate Gardens Streatham (q.v.). He was an avid art collector of works largely by Victorian artists, and established a gallery in a wing of his mansion for his collection of paintings and sculpture, which he later donated to the nation. Tate was knighted in 1898. He also established a number of charities in London and Liverpool, including two free libraries in Lambeth, one of which is the Tate Library in Brixton, built in 1893, and a theatre, built in 1894. He died in 1899, and is buried in West Norwood Cemetery (q.v.).

Sir Henry's art collection became the nucleus of the new Tate Gallery at Millbank. He had offered a gallery to the nation in 1889 but it took until 1892 to agree on its site, part of the former Millbank Penitentiary, which was built in 1812-20 and demolished in 1890. The gallery, built at Tate's expense for £80,000 as a national gallery of British Art, was designed by Sidney R J Smith and opened in 1897. The gallery was later expanded to include modern foreign art and the buildings were successively enlarged. In 2000 it was re-dedicated to British art and renamed Tate Britain, when the new Tate Modern was constructed at the former Bankside Power Station.

The gates, railings and gate piers are integral garden elements of the original layout. The north-west wing by Llewellyn-Davies Weeks, Forestier-Walker & Bor was added in the 1970s. The north-east end of the gardens were re-designed in 1984-85 to coincide with the opening of Sir James Stirling's Clore Gallery extension; in front of the entrance to the wing is a sunken paved court with a rectangular pool with stepped ends and seating against adjacent wall with planters and arbour for climbing plants. When a new entrance to the gallery was created in 1998-2001 on John Islip Street, the architects Allies & Morrison also remodelled the gardens, with a 'severe rectilinear design' (Nikolaus Pevsner); Thomas Brock's statue of Sir John Everett Millais (1904), erected in 1905, was re-sited at the corner with John Islip Street.

The gardens are occasionally used for temporary art installations, for example in summer 2010 the north-east garden between the neoclassical façade and the postmodern Clore extension was converted into Pablo Bronstein's 'Garden a la Mode'. Inspired by London's C19th pleasure gardens, a formal arrangement of trees and statuary was introduced among the mature plane trees, with obelisks and urns based on C18th designs set out on the lawn, a topiary obelisk and a semi-circular stone bench.