tate: [ intro ] [ 1:thames path ] [ 2:cannon st ] [ 3:southwark ] [ 4:waterloo ] [ 5:tate à tate ]

There is a sort of circular appropriateness that a festival of creating sparks between art and science should take visiting art galleries as the demonstrator.

Tate

The walk from Vauxhall or Victoria is published on the web elsewhere so we'll leave you to find it there.

Tate Modern

Tate Modern we'll give you here, with a number of different approaches in order to show how a transport interchange can be built up.

Tate Modern, the transport interchange

The Tate Modern Gallery has already become legendary, and the soon to be opened footbridge across the Thames from St Paul's will give us a green and smart connection which will turn the Tate into a transport interchange, not that you'd be able to tell any of that from their publicity material.

The Gallery, St Paul's and the Bridge will be widely photographed and available on the Internet, so we wont take up any bandwidth here.

What this will do is show some of the possible routes for walking to or from the gallery to a combination of transport nodes and what those nodes link. We will also point out missed opportunities for interchange engineering and information deficiencies that could be easily remedied. Comments should be sent to greenandsmart@listbot.com.

The gallery itself fits unwell into the local area, with hard boundaries and no concession to walkers being able to cross any of the roads. The Artbus connecting the two Tates is a marvellous idea, but it dumps you a long and unpleasant walk away.

At least one piece of publicity material says that it is intended to make the gallery a transport link by walking through it. But each Saturday it has been open so far, doors have been closed because the galleries (not the cavernous turbine hall, the galleries) are full. So not much chance of that coming into being.

All is not entirely positive either. The Thames Path is now cluttered by noisy and smelly ice cream and sausage selling vans, a wide variety of beggars (oops, artists) and so many people walking that in parts it is like Oxford St.. The penalties of success.

What would be truly groovy would be for the management of the gallery to make a real contribution to green and smart by getting artists and landscapers to turn these walks into signed good urban experiences through all sorts of imaginative combinations. I'll settle for now with my little piece.