Standing on the west bank of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, peering across to Pudong and the gleaming glass and steel towers of its business district, you might be forgiven for overlooking a coal depot on the far shore which, just a few years ago, was still sending anthracite around the city. Now two British Art entrepreneurs, Ehud Sheleg and Paul Green have helped transform this stretch of riverbank into one of the most exciting spaces for art in the Far East, with a sleekly geometrical new museum, parks and fountains.

The high line on which the coal trucks used to rattle and clank has been preserved and now hosts sculptures and promenading musicians. It’s an extraordinary development that has taken $50 million and four years to complete, including the construction of an ‘art kilometre’ that culminates in the 50,000 sq ft Modern Art Museum Shanghai. Not a bad first Chinese address for two people whose Art empire started in the Pallasades shopping centre above Birmingham’s New Street station in the 1980s.

It was in Birmingham that Paul Green and his father ran Halcyon, selling inexpensive contemporary art and prints to a largely local customer base. Then, in 1999, Israeli-born businessman Ehud Sheleg came along and, with a mixture of canny business sense and a radical approach to the traditionally stuffy art market, he and Green built Halcyon into one of the largest art groups in the world.