When Tate Modern opened its doors, 18 months ago, it quickly acquired extraordinary kudos among a wide church of art critics and historians, architects, gossip columnists and designers. The London gallery was pronounced innovative, sexy and very, very now. More to the point, the public seemed to agree with the arbiters of taste, and in its first year, 5.2 million people flocked to see the Tate's collection of international modern art, housed in the former Bankside power station.
Amid the fanfare, most people seemed to forget the original of the species, the Tate at Millbank, where the dynasty began, and which quietly and meekly changed its name from the Tate Gallery to Tate Britain early last year. While the crowds poured into Tate Modern to see crowd-pullers such as Picasso and Matisse, visitor numbers fell from 1.8 million to 1.2 million at Tate Britain. Even a controversial rehang, which saw works by lesser-known artists such as Maggi Hambling alongside the works of William Hogarth, did little to hoist the attendance figures or the profile of the gallery.
Now Tate Britain is fighting back with a revamp of the Millbank gallery, costing £32.3 million sterling, and a rehang of the permanent collection, both of which opened to the public at the start of the month. The aim is to get visitor figures up to 1.3 million a month, although with a 2002 programme that includes a retrospective of Lucian Freud and a large Gainsborough exhibition, you suspect Tate Britain is being overly modest in the hope of spectacularly busting its targets.
Comparisons are invidious but probably inevitable, and there was enough rapturous analysis of the Tate Modern building, which was designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, to ensure that any architectural project undertaken by the Tate will come in for considerable scrutiny. Perhaps in anticipation, Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate as a whole, which includes galleries in Liverpool and St Ives, Cornwall, seems to have refused to let the two galleries compete in the same division, in architectural terms at least.
Although Tate Britain shows signs of Serota's preference for restrained, almost clinical minimalism, it is a very different tank of formaldehyde from the stark, sleek but essentially showy Tate Modern. Designed by John Miller and Su Rogers of John Miller + Partners, who previously revamped the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington, the new sections of Tate Britain are woven so seamlessly into the fabric of the 1897 building that you'd be forgiven for wondering whether any renovation work had been done at all. This is not architecture that announces itself, it's architecture that has slipped in the side door and fitted in with a minimum of fuss.
For the most part, it's a successful policy. In a loaves-and-fishes conversion, an unused internal courtyard and some poky, hard-to-hang galleries have been sacrificed to create 10 new and five refurbished galleries. The extra 35 per cent of hanging space will ensure the popular permanent collection of works by the likes of Hogarth, Constable and Blake won't get bullied into storage by temporary exhibitions.
Upstairs, the new galleries, which sprout off the spine-like Duveen Galleries in the old building, are perhaps the most successful part of what has been named the Centenary Development.
With barrel-arched ceilings, a muted colour scheme of sage greens, gunmetal grey and dull terracotta, floors of American white oak and lots of natural light, they meld perfectly with the old galleries abutting them, which were spruced up at the same time. The dark-green marble arches between galleries were painstakingly taken apart and cleaned, and when an entirely new entrance was required, old marble was salvaged to form new architraves. Yet for all the deference of the new spaces, there is no sense of pastiche; the galleries are self-confidently but quietly contemporary.
This easy feeling of space and flow is helped by the intelligent rehang of the permanent collection. Having abandoned the thematic approach, which few liked and has now, conveniently, been revealed as a temporary experiment all along, the galleries siphon you logically from 1500 to the present day.
Yet ideas have not been totally subjugated to chronology, and each room has a loose central idea, be it concentration on a single artist and their influences or a more thematic grouping, such as Britain and Italy in the 18th century. Loans from other institutions, such as the Victoria and Albert and the British museums, fill the gaps in the Tate collection - a pragmatic policy that has facilitated quirkily interesting rooms displaying 19th-century photography and early enamel miniatures.
It comes as something of a surprise to find that the new galleries house the oldest works, as curators tend to match architecture with its artistic equivalent. But at Tate Britain, the decision to house the earlier parts of the collection in the new galleries is anything but arbitrary.
Stripped down to a bare shell, both listed rooms and their new neighbours have been fitted with environmental controls. Air-conditioning ducts now lurk behind MDF walls, roof glazing was replaced with internal blinds and sun-screening louvres, and a complex lighting system offers the possibility of uplights, downlights, spots or daylight at a flick of switch. Such technology is not just about flattering the paintings; it also ensures the survival of works on paper and the more fragile older works.
Given that the provision of this flexible environment was the aim of the gallery conversion, the muted nature of the architecture becomes even more understandable. Such respectful gallery spaces act as a perfect foil for art of any era; a more ambitious design might push itself forward at the expense of older work.
Yet the desire to combine the old and the new may also have led to some of the weaker elements of the development. A new way in to the gallery, the Manton Entrance, has been created in a side wall, meaning that the 65 per cent of the gallery's visitors who arrive by Tube are now funnelled, more logically, into the gallery from Atterbury Street.
Outside, Allies and Morrison, which designed the British embassy in Dublin, has built a disappointing entrance with all the allure of an underground car park. Its low elevation doesn't intrude on the listed exterior, and its long, low ramp fulfils a need of disabled visitors, but one longs for something with the panache of the massive sloping entrance to Tate Modern.
The new entrance and staircase are more successful, with a feeling of air and light and a series of columns that suggest a Liaisons Dangereuses kind of intrigue and glamour. Here, too, the design is restrainedly modern, at times erring on the side of the bland: the expanses of creamy limestone floor and textured plaster match the existing building, but they are a bit too Better Homes And Gardens to make much of an impact.
From here, you either ascend a spacious staircase to those upper galleries or head into the new Linbury Galleries, which are currently housing an exhibition called Exposed: The Victorian Nude. To create these six galleries, the architects knocked down some low-ceilinged rooms and excavated to a depth of seven metres to increase the available height. Even so, there is a slightly confined feeling to the rooms, which is perhaps inevitable, given their lack of natural light or window vents.
The oppressive palette of bright greens and purples does not help; nor does the exhibition, in which a succession of florid bosoms and bottoms is likely to bring on the vapours in even the most 21st century of sensibilities, albeit from boredom rather than shock. Still, the rooms are environmentally controlled and, as a gallery space devoted to temporary exhibitions, have a lot of promise.
Work of this scope and calibre doesn't come cheap, but attracting donors has always been one of Serota's strengths. Among the benefactors who have helped to fund the development are Sir Edwin and Lady Manton and the Sainsburys, as well as an eclectic set of lesser donors, including Sir Paul Getty, Jay Jopling of the White Cube gallery and the Pet Shop Boys. The bulk of the funding was provided by the British national lottery, however, which awarded almost £19 million sterling.
This year, the fund is beginning to pay off for British arts organisations in need of structural change: it gave £16 million sterling towards a renovation of the British Galleries at the V&A, which open this week, and last month it announced that it has earmarked £2.42 million sterling for the beleaguered Grade II-listed Roundhouse arts centre in London.
For the most part, whether public or private, the donors have every right to be proud of and happy with the way their money was spent, as the Centenary Development is handsome and classy, if a little unadventurous. Although there are no visitor figures yet, it seems likely that the public will be pleased, too, and that Tate Britain will indeed exceed its attendance targets, particularly once a proposed ferry service between the two Tates is running, early next year.
The development is never going to be a destination for those passionate about architecture and design, in the way Tate Modern is, but it makes Tate Britain a much more attractive destination for those passionate about British art - and when it comes to galleries, that's probably quite enough.
The Tate galleries' website is at www.tate.org.uk
