The writer is director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
French President Emmanuel Macron’s masterful ruse to get foreigners to pay for a major revamp of the Musée du Louvre has piqued the interest of normally culture-averse civil servants in His Majesty’s Treasury.
Alongside donations from France’s leading fashion houses, luxury brands and profits from Louvre Abu Dhabi, Macron will ratchet up entrance fees for non-EU visitors in 2026. This will cover the estimated €700mn-€800mn price tag for a new entrance on the Louvre’s eastern wing, transformation of the Grande Galerie of Italian painting and, best of all, relocation of the “Mona Lisa” to her own bespoke salon and ticketing. For the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, this is essential infrastructure for the estimated 12mn annual visitors the museum expects by the 2030s.
At which point, the question surfaces (and I have myself asked it): why are the permanent collections of UK national museums — such as the V&A, the British Museum and Tate — free for foreign tourists when from the Mauritshuis to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an entrance fee (sometimes for both domestic and foreign audiences) is the norm. Surely the futility of Brexit — which with the addition of the upcoming e-visa charge is now piling on yet another travel cost — liberates us to set our own ticketing system for global visitors?
We certainly need the cash. Across all major areas of support, public investment in the arts in England and Wales fell by 21 per cent from 2009/10 to 2020/21. When it comes to the state of our ageing museums and galleries, energy systems, permanent display rooms and conservation studios, comparison with colleagues in Europe, the US and Middle East is beginning to grate. Yes, we raise lots in private philanthropy, but a lead gift for sorting out the sewers is often harder to land than sponsorship of a high-profile exhibition.
With the shocking state of crumbling NHS hospitals a visible reminder of the state of key public services, museums will necessarily remain a lower priority for government investment. Especially when the public finances are so chronically stretched.
The obvious solution is to charge international tourists. If we were to introduce a way for museums to seamlessly differentiate between foreign and domestic visitors — perhaps a UK Citizen Culture App — we could then happily land the former with a £20 entrance charge. I am not averse to museum trustees being granted the freedom to do this. But a few words of caution.
First of all, the Treasury has a nasty habit of lowering public funding as it sees self-generated income growing. If that happened, all this hassle might end up, at best, netting out. What is more, the evidence shows that visitor numbers fall with charging as they do with queueing, affecting knock-on spend in museum shops and catering, all of which undermines a finely tuned business model based on superbly successful exhibition programmes.
There are also boring things to consider, like a specific VAT scheme underpinning free entry which would need to change. And there are ethical considerations: any perceived barrier to entry deters hard-to-reach visitors the most. In a multicultural city like London, some minority communities might not like the idea of proving their citizenship to enter an historically intimidating space — such places often already have complex associations around race and class.
Instead, let’s finally get on with it and introduce a tourist charge on overseas visitors at hotels and overnight tourist accommodation, but with the funds ringfenced for cultural infrastructure. In contrast to Paris, Dubai, New York, and an expanding array of major cities, London is now a crazy outlier in not having a visitor levy to manage mass tourism. This is especially perverse since accessing culture is the reason why four out of five tourists come to the capital.
According to an upcoming report from The Cultural Policy Unit, a small percentage-based charge (around 3-5 per cent) on overnight stays — rather than some form of toothless voluntary levy — could generate well over £1bn a year. Sir Sadiq Khan and his fellow city mayors should have responsibility for allocating these budgets, but with funds hypothecated towards art, culture and place making.
The UK can generate meaningful money through such a tourist charge without it being any deterrent to inbound or existing visitors, all while upholding the still-enviable ideal of universal access to museums that hold globally important collections.
What is more, this policy showcases what we are best at. With its growing dependence on the first families of luxury, Paris could soon find itself feeling just a bit too exclusive and “boujee”. Distinct from the great European royal collections, the museums of London always prided themselves on their more democratic ethos as “the people’s galleries.” Here is the chance to hold on to that noble, civic ideal.
