London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) was the most popular attraction in the UK during 2025, with its renovated gardens, new climate gallery and lack of entry fee leading to record-breaking numbers of visitors.
More than 7.1 million people passed through its doors, a 13% increase in visitors year on year and an all-time record for any UK museum or gallery.
Bernard Donoghue, the director of the Association for Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva), which compiles the annual ranking, said the NHM’s success was partly down to its renovated outdoor spaces.
“It’s an astonishingly fun, joyful day out and it’s free,” Donoghue said. “Even in a cost of living crisis, it’s clear that the last thing that people are prepared to sacrifice are day visits and spending special time with special people in special places.”
The popularity of the NHM’s Fixing Our Broken Planet gallery, which explores solutions to the climate crisis and received more than 2 million visitors, was another reason visits increased for the third year in a row.
The British Museum was second on the list with 6.4m visits, with the crown estate in Windsor (4.9m), Tate Modern (4.5m) and the National Gallery (4.1m) making up the rest of the top five.
But, with the exception of the National Gallery, which reopened the Sainsbury Wing and underwent a rehang, the other institutions at the top of the rankings saw slight declines in visitor numbers compared with last year. Most of the top 10 struggled to get anywhere near their pre-Covid numbers from 2019, a bumper year for museums and galleries caused by a healthy economy and a staycation trend.
Donoghue said the “slow and modest” growth in visitor numbers made sense during a 12-month period when many institutions struggled financially because of the cost of living crisis. He said many institutions were adapting to the government’s autumn budget in 2024, which placed financial burdens on Alva members through increased national insurance contributions and an increased minimum wage.
Donoghue added: “All of that was unplanned and hit in April of last year. So they found last year financially really tough. A lot of my members went through redundancies and restructuring programmes … It’s been a really tough operating environment.”
The difficulty institutions are having in climbing back to the heights of 2019 is in part down to some foreign visitors not returning to the UK post-Covid.
Alva picked out Chinese visitors in particular as not coming in the same numbers, with Donoghue putting that down to the UK removing tax-free shopping, which now makes France, Spain or Italy more attractive to Chinese tourists who want to combine retail and cultural tourism.
“In Italy, they’ve got back somewhere in the region of 120% of the Chinese visitors that they had in 2019; we’ve got back to 81%,” he said. “We are not as internationally competitive or attractive to the Chinese market.”
Donoghue called for the government to reduce VAT on visitor attractions, reintroduce tax-free shopping and ensure that if a “tourism tax” is introduced, it is ringfenced to ensure proceeds are invested back into culture and tourism.
There is optimism in the arts sector that 2026 will see higher visitor growth, with several big attractions and openings planned, including the British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry loan, the opening of the V&A East, the new London Museum and the Museum of Youth Culture.
