Museums in London - Visitor Figures

Visitor Figures

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) publishes monthly visitor figures for the public sector museums and galleries which it sponsors, which include most of the leading museums in London. The most popular London museum in the private sector is The Sherlock Holmes Museum. The totals of the financial year to 31 March 2008 were as follows:

• Tate Modern and Tate Britain – (see note) 6,769,949
• British Museum – 6,037,930
• National Gallery – 3,914,000
• Natural History Museum – 3,613,953
• Science Museum – 2,711,680
• Victoria and Albert Museum – 2,280,759
• National Maritime Museum – 1,765,814
• National Portrait Gallery – 1,645,680
• Imperial War Museum – 759,571
• Horniman Museum – 477,894
• Wallace Collection – 335,349
• V&A Museum of Childhood – 332,844
• Museum of London – 316,992
• Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms – 306,600
• HMS Belfast – 258,941
• Museum of London Docklands – 100,834
• Sir John Soane's Museum – 93,427
• Geffrye Museum – 80,352
• Theatre Museum – 6,852 (closed permanently in August 2007)

Note: Tate Modern and Tate Britain are on separate sites two miles apart, but the DCMS only publishes a single combined visitor figure for them. Tate Modern is widely reported to attract the more visitors of the two, but it is not clear whether it received more visitors than the British Museum on its own.