Serpentine Galleries

Listen to the gravel first. It crunches under your shoes as you leave the tarmac path. Around you, the old plane trees of Kensington Gardens hold the light in their leaves. Somewhere behind them, a dog barks, a cyclist rings a bell, and ducks argue on the water. Then, between the trunks, a low brick building appears. It looks almost too modest for what happens inside. This is the Serpentine, one of the most adventurous places in London to meet contemporary art, and it sits in the middle of a royal park.

The Serpentine is not one building but two. They stand on either side of the lake that gives them their name, linked by a short walk across the Serpentine Bridge. The original gallery, south of the water, is now often called Serpentine South. Its younger sibling, a few minutes north, is Serpentine North. Together they form a single institution. It shows living artists, commissions new architecture, and runs talks and performances. All of it happens in a landscape of lawns, trees, and wide skies.

Start with the older building. It was not designed for art at all. It began life in the 1930s as a tea pavilion, a place where Londoners could sit out of the rain with a cup and a slice of cake. You can still see that gentle, domestic character in its symmetrical brick front and its tidy proportions. In 1970, the building opened as a gallery. Few people then expected a former tearoom in a royal park to become a serious stage for the avant-garde — the experimental edge of art.

Step inside, and the brick gives way to white walls and soft daylight. The rooms are not large. That is part of their power. An artist cannot hide here behind sheer scale. Each work has to hold its own, close to your face. Notice the windows, too. Glance up from a painting or an installation, and you may see grass, branches, and walkers outside. Art and park keep looking at each other through the glass, and the light shifts with the clouds.

Before you go in, or as you leave, look down near the entrance. Set into the ground and around the building are carved stones and benches with inscriptions. They are the work of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who often combined words with stone and landscape. Many visitors walk straight over them without noticing. Pause and read a few lines. They turn the threshold of the gallery into a small poem, and they connect this building quietly to the trees around it.

Now cross the bridge to the north. Here the story becomes stranger. The core of Serpentine North is a building called the Magazine. In military language, a magazine is a store for ammunition. This one was built in 1805 to hold gunpowder. Britain was then at war with Napoleonic France, and soldiers were stationed in the parks. So the thick walls you see were designed to contain an explosion. Today they contain exhibitions, which can feel almost as explosive in a different way.

The old powder store did not open as a gallery until 2013. For that conversion, the Serpentine turned to the architect Zaha Hadid. She kept the solid brick store and added a new extension beside it. Look at that addition carefully. Its white roof flows and curves like stretched fabric, rising and dipping in soft peaks. The contrast is the point — a rigid military box from the age of muskets, joined to a fluid form that seems to move. Inside, there is a restaurant as well as gallery space.

Hadid has a deeper link with this place. In 2000, she designed a temporary structure on the lawn beside the original gallery. It was meant for a single summer event. It became the start of a tradition. Every year since, with very few gaps, the Serpentine has invited an architect to build a summer pavilion on that same patch of grass. For a few months it becomes a café, a meeting place, and a venue for evening talks. Then it comes down again.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The pavilion architect is usually someone who has not yet completed a building in England. That makes the lawn a kind of first introduction. The list of names is long and varied. Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, and Oscar Niemeyer built here in the early years. Later came Sou Fujimoto, Bjarke Ingels, Francis Kéré, and Frida Escobedo. Herzog and de Meuron worked with the artist Ai Weiwei. Some pavilions felt like clouds, some like caves, some like stacked bricks.

And where do they go when summer ends? Not to a skip. Most pavilions are sold and moved elsewhere. Some have been rebuilt in private gardens, others at cultural sites in other countries. So pieces of this lawn now stand around the world. If you visit in the colder months, the grass beside Serpentine South may look empty. But try to picture the space filled each summer with a new shape and new crowds. Then imagine that shape travelling far away afterwards.

The exhibitions themselves change often. The Serpentine has a long habit of showing artists early, sometimes before they are widely known. It also likes ideas that go beyond paintings on walls. You may find sound works, digital projects, performance, or conversations about ecology and technology. Under its long-serving artistic director, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the galleries became known for marathon events. These are long sessions of talks and performances, sometimes running for many hours, where artists, scientists, and writers share one stage.

Take a moment to place yourself on the map. Kensington Gardens flows into Hyde Park, and the boundary runs across the water nearby. To the west stands Kensington Palace, a royal residence for centuries. To the north, the lake narrows into the Long Water, where swans glide close to the banks. Diana, Princess of Wales, was a patron of the gallery, and the park holds several memorials connected to her. This setting matters. People arrive here with dogs, prams, and picnics, not only with exhibition guides.

That mix is perhaps the Serpentine's quiet secret. It puts challenging contemporary art directly in the path of everyday life. A jogger can drift in out of curiosity. A child can run from a puddle into a room of sculpture. The art does not wait in a grand temple on a busy avenue. It waits in a tearoom and a gunpowder store, under trees, beside a lake. Many people meet new art for the first time here, almost by accident.

So, before you walk on, stand still for a moment outside. Look at the brick, the white curves, or the lawn where the next pavilion will rise. Listen again to the gravel, the birds, and the voices drifting across the grass. Somewhere inside, an artist is asking you to see something differently. Out here, the park keeps its old rhythm. As you leave, notice how the trees and the water look after the art. Sometimes they look a little different too.