Letter: Backward-looking home for Tate's modern art

Sir: Bankside Power Station is better described as a 'mausoleum of power' rather than the 'temple' of yesterday's story ('Tate eyes river site for art museum', 2 November). It looks like a cenotaph and indeed casts a mighty gloom over its Thames-side site in central London. It presents a vertical acre of the ugliest-ever bricks to the City and to the river, unredeemed by masterful detailing. Despite some art deco styling, previously associated with high spirits, the building still casts a miasma of depression.

The station always was a flop. It operated for less than 10 years, spreading vast quantities of sulphurous fumes across the centre of the city. The taller chimney originally designed was rejected for being higher than St Paul's.

Its monstrous size blocks some 200 yards of Bankside from the river, and its back elevation is lined with an obsolescent sub-station. Behind this is an underground tank farm. The complex sterilises a large hinterland of office buildings that are themselves obsolete. Its construction was a disaster in urban planing, which its retention perpetuates.

Does the Tate propose to spearhead a joint redevelopment project to change this almighty mess into a visionary precinct, with new buildings representing the best British architectural talent, as it meant to do with its Turner Gallery? It proposes instead to camp in the machine rooms, perpetuating the blight and the muddle, and preventing state-of-the-art development. How backward-looking; how necrophilic; how very Britain of the Nineties.

Yours faithfully,

LAWRENCE HANSEN

Director

The Southwark Environment Trust

London, SE15

2 November

(Photograph omitted)