London’s National Gallery is still struggling to recover its pre-Covid visitor numbers, despite a boost from the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing.
The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of art museum attendance shows that the National Gallery received 4.2 million visitors in 2025, compared with 3.2 million the previous year. Both are significantly down on the 6 million visitors the museum received in 2019.
The monthly number of visitors rose after the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing in May, which included improvements to the entrance, security checks and queue management. However, they were still below 2019 levels, and if sustained will result in annual numbers of about 4.9 million, around 800,000 lower than the average of the ten years before Covid. The gallery announced in February it would have to make staffing cuts to help deal with an £8.2m deficit.
A spokesperson for the gallery said that the numbers were in line with their expectations and that “we do not forecast a full recovery to pre-Covid levels straight after the reopening”. The spokesperson said the largest contribution to the shortfall was a decline in international visitors, which were around 1.7 million lower than in 2019. To counter this the gallery is planning to “make itself more welcoming and relevant to the British public” to attract more domestic visitors. The planned £750m extension is also expected to bring in more visitors “as we tell a broader, more contemporary story of painting”.
Visitor numbers also remain soft at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, both falling slightly in 2025 from the year before. Tate Modern received 4.5 million, down a quarter on 2019, and its lowest non-Covid impacted year since 2004. Tate shared internal data with The Art Newspaper last year that attributed the falls to fewer young Europeans coming to London after Brexit.
Natural History Museum takes top spot
Across the city, the Natural History Museum (NHM) received a record number of visitors, attracting 7.1 million and leapfrogging the British Museum (6.4 million) as the most visited museum in the UK. According to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva), this is the highest number ever achieved by a UK museum. However the figures for the NHM include visitors to its recently renovated garden: there were 6.3 million visitors to the building itself.
The V&A East Storehouse opened to better visitor numbers than they expected, drawing nearly 60,000 people a month, a similar level to the Wallace Collection and the Imperial War Museum London. The nearby V&A East museum opens next month.
Institutions on mainland Europe also did well, mostly achieving similar numbers to last year and before Covid. The Musée du Louvre was once again the most-visited art museum in the world, with 9 million visitors, and the Vatican Museums were second, with 6.9 million. The Museo Nacional del Prado received a record of over 3.5 million: earlier this week they announced measures to control visitor numbers by reducing group sizes.
The most remarkable success worldwide was at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, where numbers boomed from 3.8 million to 6.5 million, which the museum attributed to the worldwide fascination with Korean culture and strong domestic visitorship. The new Shanghai Museum East had its first full year, welcoming 4.6 million visitors.
The Art Newspaper's full list of the 150 most-visited art museums in the world will be released at the beginning of April.
