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Dippy the dinosaur at the Natural History Museum in London
‘At half term my family used to enjoy a day in South Kensington together. About half an hour was allowed for each area of interest, looking at dinosaurs, fossils, engines, clothes and then whales,’ writes Gillian Mulley. Photograph: Natural History Museum/PA
‘At half term my family used to enjoy a day in South Kensington together. About half an hour was allowed for each area of interest, looking at dinosaurs, fossils, engines, clothes and then whales,’ writes Gillian Mulley. Photograph: Natural History Museum/PA

Free museum entry enriches our culture

This article is more than 8 years old

I was dismayed by Jonathan Jones’s article (Museums are not the NHS – they should charge us, 24 July). In a real sense, museums are the NHS of the mind and soul. They are the places where, as a society, a community, a nation, we store our history, our memories, our knowledge, our science, the things of beauty we have created, the special objects we want to hand down from generation to generation. They are collections that have been built up over centuries by payment largely from the public purse. Now Jonathan Jones is suggesting we should pay all over again to go in to enjoy and learn from them. How wrong can he be? Charging for entry would immediately exclude a vast proportion of our society. It would reduce visitor numbers drastically (they rose by well over 100% when free admission came in). It would inhibit the quick visit to see a few favoured objects, savour them, and decide to come back again in a few weeks’ time. It would damage tourism. And it would diminish our national life immeasurably. Our public realm is being impoverished over and over again at the moment. Please, please, don’t add this to the list.
Chris Smith
House of Lords

Free galleries encourage family visits. At half term my family used to enjoy a day in South Kensington together. About half an hour was allowed for each area of interest, chosen by each family member, looking at dinosaurs, fossils, engines, clothes and then whales, with breaks for snacks and a picnic lunch between. No stop seemed long enough, and a return visit on the next holiday was a must. Had the museums charged I am sure my husband would have insisted on devoting the day to seeing everything thoroughly, putting the rest of us off the experience.
Gillian Mulley
Saffron Walden, Essex

Jonathan Jones makes some good points in his suggestion that Britain’s museums need to start charging entrance fees. Like Jones, I have been against entrance charges in the past, but it has become increasingly clear that free entry is having awful consequences.

Many museums, particularly outside London, whose budgets have been severely cut by the government, have become sad places – under-funded, grubby, unloved. Has anyone been to Bolton Museum recently?

Elsewhere, museums have begun to employ Ryanair-like tactics to bring in money wherever and however they can. The other day, a celebrated London collection wanted to charge us £1,500 to film three objects! At those kinds of rates, arts programmes will soon become an impossibility.

Exhibitions are becoming dumber and more sensational. Scholarship is disappearing. Restaurants are getting bigger. Gift shops more expensive.

As the man said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Waldemar Januszczak, Art critic
London

To pit any part of the cultural sector against the NHS is ludicrous. We live in a complex and nuanced society, which we need to preserve.

About 20 years ago I worked at the National Museum Wales (one of Britain’s “regional” museums that Mr Jones patronisingly refers to) when admission charges were introduced. The visitor figures plummeted but then recovered and even grew after a couple of years. Great? No. What had changed was the demographic. No longer the low-waged visitors but the wealthy middle classes on coach trips. Some years later, when the admission charge was dropped, visitor numbers almost tripled overnight. Once again the national museums were providing a service for all (as was the intention when they were first set up in South Kensington in the Victorian period).

Local authority museums services are being slowly destroyed. If admission charges were introduced it would be the final nail in the coffin as the vast majority are not tourist honeytraps but locally focused relayers of community memory.

At a time when poverty is increasing (worst of all, perhaps, in-work poverty) and families are facing significant barriers to the essentials of life, Mr Jones seems to be advocating raising yet another barrier to arts and culture. There are many, many academically rigorous research projects that prove the health benefits of learning in a museum/cultural context. The real cultural and societal truth is that we all benefit from museums remaining free to everyone.
Essex Havard
Alacs (Adult Learning and the Culture Sector), Cardiff

As an art teacher I took GCSE and A-level groups to the National Gallery, the Tate, and the V&A, for over 25 years. Wonderful themed tours of the National would always start with the question “who does this collection belong to?” with common answers being the Queen or the government. Delighted guides would then tell them that it was theirs. Their parents’ taxes paid for it, their future taxes would go on paying for it, and of course plenty of things they buy already include tax. If I go into provincial town museums, information boards will often tell me that a piece has been donated to the town. I take that to mean all of the people of that town. If admission fees are introduced, it will be the poor who will stop going to galleries. After every recent budget the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than the rich. So their taxes will go on subsidising the comfortable, me included, as they visit paying entry fees which don’t make the slightest dent on their income.
Graham Mollart
Farnham, Surrey

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