The street behind Tate Modern in London has been closed to the public after glass window panels fell from a residential high-rise.
The panels appear to have fallen from the Neo Bankside development, with shattered glass visible on the ground outside one of the buildings in Holland Street. One panel fell on Monday morning around 9am and one the previous night, a security guard told passers-by. No one seems to have been hurt in the incidents.
One passer-by said on X that a panel landed about 10ft away from her, leaving her feeling shocked. She told The Art Newspaper: “It was surreal. I was walking from Blackfriars to my office on Southwark Street and I saw some of the pavement was taped off, so I crossed the road and just as I got to the other side I heard a giant crash behind me. I turned around and saw that there was glass over the road. Thankfully no one was hurt, but several of us stood and just looked, shocked about what had happened. I couldn’t see where it had come from, so it must have been high up on the building.”
Visitors to Tate Modern, which received 4.7 million visitors last year, were being directed away from the site towards the main Turbine Hall entrance. All entrances are now fully open and operating normally, says a spokesperson.
The Neo Bankside development was designed by the British firm Rogers Stirk
Harbour + Partners, co-founded by one of the architects of the Centre Pompidou, Richard Rogers. Some residents of the building were involved in a long-running dispute with Tate over the museum’s viewing gallery, which they said allowed people to see into their homes. Access to the rear of the viewing gallery is now restricted.
In 2018, a man was killed when a window fell from a residential development on Albert Embankment, further along the River Thames.