Tate Art Galleries

In March of 2018, SPIE UK was awarded a national facilities maintenance contract with Tate, the organisation responsible for housing the UK’s national collection of art.

The five year partnership is the culmination of twenty-nine years’ work with the institution, a true demonstration of SPIE’s understanding of the customer’s needs – current and in the future.

The new multi-million-pound contract will see the engineering led service delivery model be re-defined and re-structured in readiness for Tate’s renewed confidence in SPIE for the next five years. This will be supported and delivered by SPIE’s highly skilled maintenance operations and central engineering teams.

The main challenge posed by Tate was to invent a new engineering approach to the hard services maintenance for the complexity of rooms and galleries, public spaces, and back of house arrangements. Incorporating assets where assessment of plant criticality requires team work and detailed knowledge of the facilities in order to safeguard gallery conditions, made SPIE an ideal choice. Additionally, SPIE’s experience of direct interface with the public enables them to support special events through seamless gallery maintenance.

A feature of this new contract is the integration of energy management support and a life cycle analysis process. SPIE also offers a new plant life cycle upgrade service (PLUS) for the improvement and life extension of existing critical plants.

Over the last twenty-nine years, SPIE has supported Tate with a number of important and often critical engineering studies, and solutions ranging from infrastructure to operational needs and system operational improvements, including work at Tate Britain, Tate Modern in London, to Tate within Liverpool and St Ives.

SPIE will also be supporting the parallel soft services contractor with coordinated reactive activity scheduling within the enhanced CAFM structure.

In light of the contract win, George Adams, SPIE UK’s Director of Energy and Engineering and Paul Horsley, SPIE’s Account Manager commented, “We are extremely proud of SPIE’s flexible approach to our clients’ challenges, and our work for Tate is a proof in point. Our engineering and operational solution will in the contract duration save Tate cost, reduce risks and improve life cycle needs”

Tate’s collection helps make them one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions with nearly six million visitors per year. Extending from Liverpool to London and down to St. Ives, the contract requires engineering expertise, maintenance experience and full understanding of the importance of the hard services delivery to protect the valuable art works and high standard of public interface.