Jeannine Alton looks at a book which tells the story of how the Tate's new gallery for modern art has been created in a former power station

The ord has become so unmentionable that it's a real pleasure to salute one of the permanent and quite remarkable achievements of the Millennium Commission: Tate Modern, the huge gallery re-created from Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside Power Station.

I was lucky enough to have a preview in February of work in progress, and the exhilaration hasn't worn off yet. Now Karl Sabbagh's book, a tie-in with the mesmerising Channel 4 series (both commissioned with shrewd enterprise way back in 1994), comes to record some of the agonies and ecstasies of the project by the Swiss architects Hertzog and Meuron, with Heritage Lottery funds.

Sabbagh's accounts of meetings and discussions are authentic, there's a useful index and an essential list of dramatis personae which gives an idea of the innumerable organisations and personalities involved, including some who arrived partway through like the new Director Lars Nittve, and some who didn't, or who departed - a process apparently known as "crumbling". Chief hard-hat in the Boiler House is of course Tate Supremo Sir Nicholas Serota, austere and Robespierre-like, whose insight inspired the initial choice of the building and drove it through on budget, on time, not quite without catastrophes (well chronicled by Sabbagh) but without scandal, at a cost of 134m, piffling when you think of that other lace downriver at Greenwich.

Pacing out the Bankside Station one evening, Serota decided against pressing for a new building in the mode of Gehry's Guggenheim at Bilbao and unlike the L.S. Lowry Gallery at Salford or the New Art Gallery at Walsall.

No wonder. Bankside's central Turbine Hall is 500 feet long and 115 feet high: about eight cricket pitches by two, if that helps, with the Boiler House equally long and considerably wider and the phallic tower gazing over the river to the City and St. Paul's. What is astonishing is how much of the uncompromising basic feel has been retained. The west entrance takes you down a low sloping ramp like a car park, and suddenly reveals the vast Turbine Hall, its machinery removed; severe black beams support the walls; across the centre runs an access bridge; beyond, the great original steel gantry looms, now destined to install massive artworks and sculptures; the whole top lit by daylight.

Its walls are grey. The choices of colour and texture for materials and decoration throughout were bound to be controversial when artists and architects were in partnership, and assumed as much importance, as Sabbagh relates them, as discovering asbestos in the roof or the wrong height for the grand staircase.

He gives a splendid account of a meeting to discuss the upholstery of the 200-seat auditorium. We have, mercifully, been spared the violent orange proposed by the architects (too seventies, it was thought) and the place now glows in what I can only call Hell Red. Comfy seats though. I tried them. There is a very practical dimension to the question "what is art?" The floor grilles might be confused with a Carl Andr installation, and the elegant benches provided for footsore visitors are so beautifully designed that they actually were mistaken for artworks.

The art is displayed on three levels, one of them a double height gallery with Scott's tall mullioned "cathedral" windows. On my visit, that was still in process of installation, following a meticulous long-prepared plan, as was the huge "Light Beam" on Level 7, the restaurant floor.

But I could go to the caf-brasserie level and enjoy the same stupendous Thameside spectacle of Wordworthian ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples. Quite marvellous.

Paintings and sculpture are to be shown on thematic, not chronological, lines and startling juxtapositions are promised: Monet and Long, for example. Could it be too clever and is it possible to have too much space to fill? All will be revealed from May 12, and there's much more to come. In June the Millennium Bridge (Foster, Ove Arup and Caro) will link Bankside and the City. Given time (and cash) the huge tower, the underground oil tank storage space, and the Switch House will be transformed and incorporated. And the whole area is just fizzing: on the west the Bankside Gallery, long a favourite centre for watercolours and etchings, to the east the Globe, the Rose Theatre (in progress) and Southwark.

The little terrace of 17th-century houses, miraculous survivors, occupied by Cathedral grandees, is safe. But Serota and co. have doomed as an "eyesore" the paper merchant's premises too near their gorgeous creation. They'd like to demolish it and have a "facility".

I loved it, a piece of shabby, industrial working London still there amid the aesthetes, as Covent Garden used to be. Let's keep it. The Tate's big enough and grand enough to overlook this humble symbol of ordinary life at its knees.

**Power Into Art by Karl Sabbagh is published by Penguin at 20.

**This article first appeared in The Oxford Times Weekend section, May 5