The architects told the planners that they wanted the new building to look like the gasworks it would replace. Eldred Evans and David Shalev had won the commission for Tate St Ives in 1988 on the strength of a curved white concrete drum, set into the cliff above Porthmeor beach, whose silhouette echoed the round gas-holder that had stood on the site since the Victorians. When the gallery opened in June 1993, 120,000 people walked through it before the end of the year. The point was never the building. The point was that for seventy years the St Ives painters — Hepworth, Nicholson, Heron, Lanyon, Wynter, Gabo — had sent their work to London. Now the work could come home to the beach where it had been made.
In 1988 the trustees of the Tate Gallery bought a derelict gasworks on Porthmeor beach and commissioned Eldred Evans and David Shalev — a London-based practice with serious civic credentials — to build a regional Tate on the site. Funding came from the European Regional Development Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation, and public donations. The building broke ground in 1991 and opened on 23 June 1993, the second of Tate's regional galleries after Tate Liverpool. Its curved facade, white render, and broad bay windows that look directly onto the surf at Porthmeor were a deliberate quotation of the gas-holder; the locals who had grown up with the gasworks could read the resemblance instantly. The opening received unusually warm press. One hundred and twenty thousand visitors came in six months.
Tate St Ives exists specifically to show the modern British artists who lived and worked in west Cornwall. Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson found Alfred Wallis painting on cardboard in 1928 and started what would become the St Ives School. Barbara Hepworth moved down in 1939 with Nicholson and the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo, attracted by the light and pushed out of London by the threat of war. Patrick Heron joined them. Peter Lanyon, born in St Ives, painted abstract landscapes from the cockpit of his glider until he died in a glider crash in 1964. Bryan Wynter. Bryan Pearce. John Wells. The list is unusually long for a town of five thousand people, and the gallery's permanent rotation reads as their family album. Above the gallery on Barnoon Hill sits the Barbara Hepworth Museum, which Tate has managed since 1980 — Hepworth's studio and sculpture garden preserved by her own wish in perpetuity from the year of her death in 1975.
By 2012 the gallery was being asked to do more than its building allowed. It had become one of the most visited attractions in the UK, but it could only show one major exhibition at a time, and changeovers meant closing for weeks. The trustees ran a competition for an extension; Jamie Fobert Architects won. The £20 million project added almost 600 square metres of gallery space carved into the hillside behind the original drum, with a new 500-square-metre showpiece room. The Tate closed in October 2015 for the works and stayed shut for two years. It reopened on 14 October 2017 with a solo show by sculptor Rebecca Warren titled All That Heaven Allows. The building immediately collected awards: the 2018 Art Fund Museum of the Year (£100,000 prize, beating the Brooklands Museum, the Ferens Art Gallery, Glasgow Women's Library, and the Postal Museum), a Stirling Prize shortlisting that year, a Civic Trust Award in 2019.
Tate St Ives runs roughly four major shows a year and uses its expanded space to push beyond the founding generation. Rebecca Warren in 2017. A Virginia Woolf exhibition in 2018, inspired by the author's St Ives childhood and her view of Godrevy lighthouse across the bay. Patrick Heron in association with Turner Contemporary that summer. Anna Boghiguian, Huguette Caland, Otobong Nkanga, Petrit Halilaj, Haegue Yang. The Casablanca Art School in 2023. Liliane Lijn's Arise Alive in 2025. The Barbara Hepworth retrospective Art and Life ran from late 2022 to spring 2023 and brought together more of her work than had been shown in one place since her own lifetime. The pattern is deliberate: the St Ives painters in dialogue with artists from outside the canon those painters created.
On the top floor of the original building, behind a curved wall of glass, the Tate cafe looks straight down onto Porthmeor beach. On a good day the surfers are out, the painters' studios built into the back wall of the beach are open with their workshops visible from above, and the sea at high tide laps against the granite breakwater two storeys below. There is no useful way to look at this view and not understand why the artists came. The light off Porthmeor sand at mid-morning is the same light Hepworth carved in, the same light Nicholson abstracted, the same light Heron made his whole career out of trying to fix on canvas.
Tate St Ives stands on Porthmeor beach at 50.215 N, 5.485 W, on the north-facing side of the St Ives peninsula. Best photographed from 1,200 to 1,800 feet on a westerly track to catch the white curved facade against the surf line and Godrevy lighthouse on the horizon to the east. Newquay (EGHQ) lies 20 miles north-east; Land's End (EGHC) is 12 miles south-west. Heavy summer footfall at the beach; coastal cliffs immediately behind.