Inside it’s all exposed concrete, very different from the old power station, which is steel beneath its skin. Brick just doesn’t want to be used like a net in this way and it’s distinctly perverse, not to mention very fiddly and expensive, to do so. It’s a strange object, this ziggurat, with its curious, knobbly, loose-weave brick overcoat, wrapping somewhat awkwardly round the building’s sharp creases. A new restaurant and a much bigger members’ room are high up here, too. As at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a lot of visitors will just head straight for the viewpoint and ignore the art inside. Much better than the Shard, say, where you’re so high that you are essentially gazing down at a relief map. You’re some 200 feet up, which is optimum for such a belvedere. The ziggurat rises high above the roof of the old power station, topped by an open public observation deck that does the business, giving you a fine new view across to the flank of St Paul’s cathedral, or south London if you prefer. Now you’ll be able to walk right through the place, from one side to the other if you like, tempted by a big ground-floor bar on the way. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1950s Bankside power station, which Tate took over, pointedly turned its back on poor old Southwark. Finally on the people-distribution front, there is a new south entrance where there was none before. You also find one heck of a fine sweeping staircase in smooth moulded concrete, spawn of a brutalist Busby Berkeley. When you enter the perforated-brick ziggurat of the new ten-storey extension, therefore, what you find inside is an impressively huge bank of lifts, worthy of one of the mega-lobbies at Canary Wharf. A woke witch hunt has taken over the arts

Tate modern tate modern oil tank walls