This is The Guardian.

Hello, I'm Charlotte Higgins. I'm the Chief Culture writer of The Guardian,

and I'm with you today to introduce my long read,

How Nicholas Sarota's Tate changed Britain.

The article was published in June 2017, and it was published at the moment that

Nicholas Sarota was stepping down as director of Tate.

Now, he'd been director of Tate since 1988, so he had this enormously long span,

and it'd become really the most powerful person arguably in British cultural life.

And he'd presided over and caused huge change for that institution,

most importantly, the opening of Tate's modern.

And I wanted really to delve into not just his life, his career, what kind of a man he was,

and how he'd transformed Tate, but also how that connected with the currents of this

broader cultural change in Britain over that same period, how those things intersected,

how he'd ridden those changes, and in some ways, I think, also caused some of those changes.

Part of the impetus behind writing the piece actually was that I felt that,

from where we were standing in 2017, it was quite easy to forget how different Britain had been

in the mid-1980s when Nicholas Sarota was a young man thinking about whether he should apply

to be director of the Tate or not. In terms of where contemporary art sits in British culture,

it is completely transformed.

Contemporary art just wasn't a part of popular culture and the way that it absolutely is now,

but looking back on it from this perspective, it really feels like it was the end of an era,

because things have changed so radically since then.

...