‘The arts are part of all our lives. It’s not a question of them being a luxury’

The outgoing Arts Council chair talks unmade beds and pickled sharks on a stroll with Rachel Sylvester past the London galleries and museums he transformed during his half a century as Britain’s biggest cultural champion

- Rachel Sylvester

It is 50 years to the day since Nicholas Serota started as director of the Whitechapel Gallery when we meet outside the east London venue for our walk between the cultural landmarks of the capital.

“It was on the edge of the City and, of course - this was 1976 - there had been a big influx of people from Bangladesh,” he says. “The whole area was very run down. I was interested in making a gallery that had international aspirations but was also related to the local community.”

Over the next decade, Serota transformed the gallery from a struggling artistic backwater into a groundbreaking cultural institution. He put on exhibitions of the American sculptor Eva Hesse and the German painter Gerhard Richter, as well as promoting emerging British artists including Antony Gormley, Richard Long and Tony Cragg. But he also staged a landmark show called Arts of Bengal. “Suddenly everyone realised the gallery was something they could engage with and that it was not just for people from the West End. It was also for people from the East End.”

Serota, 80, has done more than anyone in Britain to popularise contemporary art. As director of the Tate, he turned a fusty collection of paintings in Pimlico into an empire with four museums around the country. He restored a derelict power station on the South Bank to create Tate Modern, attracting more than 5 million visitors a year. Since 2017 he has been chair of the Arts Council, a position he leaves at the end of this month.