National Portrait Gallery reopens transformed with an easier layout and refreshed displays

For the past three years, the National Portrait Gallery has been a building site, but now it’s reopened, with a large new reception entrance, a dramatic escalator to the top floor, and loads more space.Although it holds a national museum collection, the Portrait Gallery has always felt a bit like an afterthought stuck onto the back of the National Gallery, not helped by sharing a lot of the same name, and much of the same building design — and a fairly small entrance onto a narrow bu