Visitors paying the price for museum funding cuts - Museums Association

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Visitors paying the price for museum funding cuts

With museums’ budgets being continually hit by cuts to public funding, institutions are under increasing pressure to become more self-sufficient. But is charging £22 to visit a temporary exhibition the best solution? Geraldine Kendall Adams investigates
The National Gallery and Tate Modern in London have made the headlines in recent months for breaching a once-significant psychological barrier: pushing up the cost of a ticket to their temporary exhibitions beyond £20 for the first time. A full-price weekend ticket to the former’s Monet & Architecture, and the latter’s Picasso 1932: Love Fame, Tragedy exhibitions will set visitors back £22 a head. This comes after the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) broke new ground last year by charging £24 for a ticket to its Pink Floyd blockbuster.

These figures are only the most eye-catching evidence of the increasing burden of cost being placed on visitors – particularly in London – as national museums have their public funding whittled away.

Although access to permanent collections remains free – a policy that still has the support of the UK government, at least for now – institutions are imposing a growing range of extra charges and donation requests on their audiences. Visitors to the V&A are asked to pay between £1 and £5 to use the cloakroom and £1 to use the pushchair storage area, while the National Museum of Scotland charges £1.50 per item for its cloakroom, and Ulster Museum £1. The British Museum and Natural History Museum charge between £1 and £5, according to weight (folded pushchairs are free).

Many institutions also seek what they describe as a voluntary donation for maps – the V&A and Tate ask for £1, while the British Museum suggests £2. But not all national museums impose such charges: Imperial War Museums (IWM), National Museums Liverpool (NML) and Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museums Wales) provide cloakroom or locker facilities for a refundable £1 deposit, as well as providing maps without requests to donate money.

Additional costs

Elsewhere, visitors – particularly those with children – may also find themselves paying for additional attractions on the exhibition floor. The National Museum of Scotland’s display of astronaut Tim Peake’s Soyuz spacecraft is free to enter, but features a virtual reality experience that costs £5, while the Science Museum offers various flight simulators that range in price from £5 to £12 a go.

It’s difficult to criticise national museums for charging market rates or maximising every income stream available to them; the Westminster government has cut grant in aid for England’s national museums by at least 30% since 2010 and has placed great pressure on public institutions to become more self-sufficient and to commercialise their services. And although national museums in the devolved nations have been better protected from government cuts, they have also lost significant amounts of public funding.

There is an argument to be made that, in the current climate, high temporary-exhibition fees and add-on charges act as a cost subsidy for other ventures such as outreach and education work. Bernard Donoghue, the director of the Association for Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva), says: “More and more museums are doing income-generation events to build up their reserves, so that they can better complete their charitable mission.”

But some of these more commercial ventures pose a danger to public perception: even where charges appear nominal, they all add up. And there is growing evidence that preconceptions about the overall cost of a museum trip act as a significant deterrent to some audience groups, particularly domestic visitors in England’s expensive capital city.

To inform its future cultural strategy, the London Mayor’s Office recently worked with Alva to conduct a survey of people in the boroughs with the lowest levels of cultural consumption. It found that, in addition to lack of awareness of London’s national institutions, or perceptions of not being welcome in them, the most frequently cited factor in discouraging those visitors was the overall cost of a day out. The cost of admission to a temporary exhibition is one factor, but there are also ancillary costs such as travel and food and the pressure to buy something in the shop.

Combined with the impact of transport problems, inflation and concerns about terrorism, this image of London’s national museums as an “expensive day out” is starting to have a negative impact on visitor numbers. Alva’s visitor figures for 2017, released last month, show that while national museums in Scotland and Northern Ireland had a record year, some of the English capital’s big-hitters had a more challenging time, with the British Museum’s numbers declining by 8% and the National Gallery’s footfall dropping by 16.5%. For some, it was the third year running that they had lost visitors.

This appears to be indicative of a more long-term trend. Figures from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport show that, even after accounting for the removal of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums from its figures in 2016, visits to England’s national museums have fallen by 5% over the past three financial years. The decline is despite a 5% increase in the number of overseas tourists, indicating that it is domestic visits that are waning. This drop appears to be having an impact. Last month, London’s National Portrait Gallery made 7% of its staff redundant after its footfall slumped by a third last year.

Changing practices

Some national museums have taken note of these developments and are changing their practices accordingly. From July, IWM is planning to scrap charges to all temporary exhibitions at its London and Manchester sites for its 2018 season. Meanwhile, last month Tate launched Tate Collective, a free-to-join membership scheme open to 16- to 25-year-olds that will offer £5 tickets for exhibitions. Other venues are exploring ways of making outings more cost effective. These include offering savings such as value food menus for children, family membership schemes to encourage repeat visits, and travel bursaries for schools.

The slowdown in visitor numbers in London, combined with eye-watering price hikes, has brought with it inevitable calls from some quarters for the government to scrap free admission and allow national museums to charge a flat entry fee, rather than a range of prices for their services. A recent comment piece in the Times newspaper called on museums and galleries to start “making some people, particularly foreign tourists, pay”.

“There is no concrete evidence that charging excludes particular groups of the population; anyway, charging exorbitant ticket prices for the best shows gives the lie to the idea of catering for disadvantaged groups,” the article continued.

This argument finds little favour among museum professionals, many of whom point out that the government would be highly unlikely to reinvest any money saved from scrapping free entry back into the sector – the funding would simply be lost for good. It also ignores the success of national museums in northern England and the devolved nations, which are continuing to increase their footfall, as well as attracting a more diverse audience profile than London’s museums.

David Fleming, the former director of NML and the professor of public history at Liverpool Hope University, says: “When I worked at NML, we avoided admission charges wherever possible because we were acutely conscious of the deterrent effect that charges have on people with low incomes, and on repeat visits.”

So what is a fair price to pay for a trip to a national museum? “Free is the fairest price of all,” says Fleming, who recently ended his second term as the president of the Museums Association.

“Not everywhere can be free, owing to the fact that many institutions need the admission income to survive: someone has to pay the costs,” Fleming says. “The question is who – and how?”
Temporary exhibition charges
The British Museum: “Our ticket prices are consistent with other major charging shows in London. We need to cover the costs of transporting objects and displaying them in the best possible conditions. Over the past decade, the British Museum, like many other organisations, has opened larger, state-of-the-art temporary exhibition venues, and the programming has become more extensive and varied.

Our exhibitions often include large 3D loans or objects that are light sensitive and a complete exhibition ‘build’ for each show. “Exhibition and loan costs have increased over the past decade as the market has grown and become more ambitious.

This has coincided with a decline, in real terms, in government funding and an increased focus on self-generated income. The British Museum now receives about 40% of its income from the government, with 60% self-generated.”

The V&A: “In some cases, exhibitions are built around a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or offer an immersive visitor experience, and the complex nature of these projects can be a factor in setting the ticket price.”

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