It feels strange to enter a gallery of contemporary art beneath a massive classical portico. Yet there is a kind of inevitability in Charles Saatchi’s journey from abandoned factory to classical pudding.

Saatchi’s first gallery was poetically situated in a former paint works, and in 1985 it was among the first of London’s industrial art spaces. It was designed by American architect Max Gordon, superbly connected with the New York art scene. London’s art remained confined to the prissy galleries of Cork Street or the second-rate classical public galleries: the bright light and white walls of Boundary Road blinded with their cleanness, blew up the scale and allowed the mostly American, mostly big art to glow.