Tate Britain’s New Garden Turns a Taxi Rank Into a Climate-Conscious Public Space
A stretch of tarmac beside Tate Britain is being recast as something far more ambitious than ornamental landscaping. Early next year, the museum expects to complete the Clore Garden, a permanent green space designed to increase biodiversity, respond to rising temperatures in central London, and give the public a new place to linger, learn, and move through the site more freely.
The project is a joint gift to Tate and the Royal Horticultural Society from the Clore Duffield Foundation. Landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith is transforming what was once largely hard surface and a taxi rank into what he calls a “biodiverse exotic garden,” using drought-resistant species that can cope with the city’s changing climate. The planting includes Mediterranean figs, Japanese sago palms, Persian lilac, and Schefflera shweliensis, a glossy evergreen native to the Eastern Himalayas.
Stuart-Smith has long worked at the intersection of horticulture and cultural institutions, with gardens at the Hepworth Wakefield, Chatsworth House, and Windsor Castle among his commissions. For Tate Britain, he also looked to the collection itself. Victor Pasmore’s *The Green Earth* informed the garden’s informal, organic structure, while Merlin Sheldrake’s *Entangled Life* helped shape a network of narrow waterways and small bubbling dishes that will thread through the planting and feed into a bowl-shaped water feature near the Tate Britain café.
The garden has already had a public trial run of sorts. A condensed version, shown at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in May as The Tate Britain Garden, won a gold medal. At its center was Barbara Hepworth’s 1949 limestone sculpture *Bicentric Form*, the first time a work from a national collection has been exhibited within a garden at Chelsea. Other modern and contemporary works from Tate’s holdings will also appear in the finished space, though Stuart-Smith says the planting will remain the dominant presence.
That balance matters to Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, who sees the garden as part of a broader effort to make the museum feel more open and less sealed off from its surroundings. The project will also include outdoor learning areas and a classroom for schoolchildren and adult learners, extending the museum’s role beyond display into education and civic use.
Elsewhere, Turner Contemporary in Margate is widening its own environmental focus with a weekend conference devoted to marine themes. Together, the two institutions suggest a shift that is becoming harder to ignore: for museums, ecology is no longer a side concern, but part of how they imagine their public role.
