Tate St Ives is an art gallery above Porthmeor Beach, showing modern British artists with links to the town and its light. It was built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, designed by the architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev, and it opened in June 1993 as the second Tate gallery outside London, after Liverpool.
The gallery
The building looks out over the beach that drew the painters in the first place, and Tate has cared for the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in the town since 1980. The gallery closed in October 2015 for expansion and reopened in October 2017, with an extension by Jamie Fobert Architects. In July 2018 it was named Art Fund Museum of the Year.
The town's art
Tate St Ives is the modern anchor of a long story: the artists' colony that settled here from the 1880s, the studio culture of the mid twentieth century, and the galleries and studios that still fill the streets behind the harbour.
Sources
Last checked: 2026-10-11