The National Gallery’s next-door neighbor has one of the most unprepossessing entrances, overshadowed by its own glitzy shop. Yet the National Portrait Gallery is a very contemporary place, where stiff, bewigged aristocracy of old, painted by elite portrait painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, share the building with shockingly contemporary works. The Early 20th-Century Galleries, revamped by Piers Gough, are almost a sculpture in their own right, where an arching white vaulted roof brings extraordinary light to the paintings mounted on glass walls. Portrait number NPG 1 may be William Shakespeare (attributed to John Taylor, circa 1610), but it’s the paintings and photographs of modern heroes that are most striking. Actor Kwame Kwei-Armah, in a gray suit, sits criss-crossed by shafts of light in a photograph by Horace Ové. Harry Potter author J. K. Rawlings is cramped into a tiny writing space, a plate of boiled eggs on her desk, in a surreal-style portrait by Stuart Pearson Wright. It’s a mind-boggling collection of faces to take in, so don’t try to do it all in one go. Take a break and wander out into the street, grab a coffee from Prét a Manger, and see how the facial types of modern London compare.