British museums drop entry fees

Admission will soon be free to a collection of Britain's leading visitor attractions, report CAROLINE VIRR and LAWRENCE HOURAHANE.

A modest revolution takes place among Britain's leading national museums next month - the admission fees will be abolished.

Some of London's top visitor attractions, including the Imperial War Museum, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, National Maritime Museum and the Museum of London, will be free to all comers for the first time since charges were introduced in the late-80s and early-90s.

Adult admission to the Science Museum alone cost £7.95 ($NZ27) so touring the capital's collections has been an expensive business.

You might expect tourists from Britain and abroad to postpone their visits until next month but Rebecca Stephens, head of marketing for the Imperial War Museum, says: "There is no real evidence that people are putting off visits."

Outside the capital, admission fees will be abolished at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, the Royal Armouries in Leeds and Wakefield's National Coal Mining Museum for England.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is getting ahead of its rivals by abandoning admission charges even earlier, on November 22.

This is timed to coincide with the opening of its new British galleries. The museum says it "may experience a small dip in the number of visitors a week or so beforehand" but the Radical Fashion exhibition, which runs to January 6, has already recorded promising visitor numbers.

Since children under 17 and senior citizens are already allowed free entry, abolishing admission fees will affect only adults below retirement age.

At present, adults can get in free to most national museums after 4.30 pm daily, although at weekends the Natural History Museum in London continues charging until 5 pm.

Privately run museums close to those abolishing entrance charges have expressed concern over how the abolition of charges will affect their visitor numbers.

Since there is a finite number of visitors for any given area, the theory goes, people will choose the free museum at the expense of those that make a charge for admission.

The counter argument is that, in a highly competitive tourism environment, free entrance to museums attracts a larger number of visitors to an area and they have more cash to spend as a result.

The issue is being debated hotly in Wales, where the Welsh Assembly introduced free admission to the eight national museums and galleries in April at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis.

So far the response has been impressive.

The millionth visitor of the year passed through the doors of a Welsh museum a week ago.

"It's brought a much-needed fillip to tourism in Wales, boosting the return to tourist attractions by UK visitors," says the Wales Tourist Board.

The National Museum and Gallery in Cardiff's Civic Centre has attracted 50 per cent more visitors so far this year than it did during all of last year.

The number of people visiting the Museum of Welsh Life (formerly the Welsh Folk Museum) at St Fagan's on the outskirts of Cardiff has more than doubled to 520,000 and it seems likely that overall visitor numbers in Wales will double this year.

Could Britain's other museums find themselves overstuffed once the free-admission policy begins? The Imperial War Museum thinks not. It is planning for a 10 per cent increase in visitors, though recent events in the United States may change these figures.

- INDEPENDENT

Victoria and Albert Museum