What with Sir Nicholas Serota's Dimbleby lecture pleading for public understanding of modern art, heated debates on the relative merits of dissected livestock and soiled bed linen on TV and in op-ed pages, and visitor numbers going through Lottery-remodelled roofs, it's a propitious time for Victoria Miro to be opening a new temple to modern art just a stone's throw from the cutting-edge ground-zero of Hoxton in east London.
Miro is one of the grandes dames of the BritArt scene, having opened her Cork Street gallery in 1985 and given the public its first sightings of the elephant dung-adorned paintings of Chris Ofili and the mutant mannequins of the Chapman Brothers; she's also showcased artists from further afield, including the priapic oils of New York-based Cecily Brown and the huge photoscapes of Germany's Andreas Gursky.
Her new space, in a Grade II listed former Victorian furniture factory, represents a quantum leap in terms of scale; a Tardis-like door opens into 10,000sq ft over two floors, a 10-fold increase on Cork Street. Architect Trevor Horne has retained some of the building's original features, including gnarled roof beams, skylights, and a rickety staircase (the latter should prove challenging on torrid opening nights). A scrubby wasteland at the rear - complete with stretch of the Regent's Canal - will be transformed by gallery artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. The gallery's debut show has an appropriately architectural bent; Thomas Demand's photographs of spookily pristine interiors, painstakingly constructed in miniature from paper and card, and including such personally and collectively charged sites as his old school staircase and the corridor leading to the apartment of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Gallery directors Glenn Scott Wright and Victoria Miro say the move wasn't prompted by spatial considerations alone: 'With galleries like Jay Jopling's White Cube already out here, there's a buzz to the area,' says Scott Wright. 'And with West End rents quadrupling, I'm sure more will follow.' But will visitors also make the trek? 'We held a group show before the building was renovated, and got 4,000 people on the opening day,' he says. 'We'd wait about six months to get that many in Cork Street.' And with forthcoming shows by Ofili, Gursky and Peter Doig, everything in her soon-to-be-landscaped garden looks rosy.