Natural History Museum is UK's most popular museum with 7.1m visits in 2025
- maxwell museums
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
London’s Natural History Museum is the most visited museum in Britain. It welcomed 7.1 million people in 2025, according to new figures released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA).
Not only is it the UK’s most popular museum, it’s the most popular visitor attraction of all types across the country — the first time it’s won this accolade.
The museum in South Kensington is now a record breaker too. It has smashed the record for the most visitors to any museum or gallery in a single year in British history.
The Natural History Museum hit the top spot with a 13% rise on annual visits compared to 2024. That pushed the British Museum down to second place, as they had a modest 1% year-on-year decline to 6.4 million visits.
Windsor Great Park was the UK’s third-busiest visitor attraction in 2025, with 5 million visits. Tate Modern was fourth with a 2% annual decline to 4.5 million visits.
The ALVA visitor figures will also have caused celebrations at the London Transport Museum. With 450,000 visits (up 6%), it’s their highest annual attendance in their 45-year history.
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Other successes in the data include the new V&A East Storehouse, which welcomed 416,300 visitors too, in under 7 months, running well ahead of predictions. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery saw a 305% increase in visits after their phased reopening from renovations; Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum tipped over 1m visits (and are 15% up on pre-covid); and Edinburgh’s National Galleries Scotland: National welcomed over 2m visitors for the first time ever.
Director Doug Gurr: "find something that will engage"
But why the success for the Natural History Museum?
Well director Doug Gurr in an interview with the Telegraph newspaper said their triumph was down to “expanding the scale of the offer” and a “good-quality programme.”
He also clearly sees the value in partnering with brands that have a fan-base outside the museum — and even the natural history — worlds. An exhibition based on JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts series opened in 2020 and was visited by 135,000 people (although it suffered from covid disruptions). And in January 2026 a Natural History Museum and Pokémon tie-up saw a pop-up shop and online merchandise range launch to so much demand it crashed their online servers.
“I think it’s about saying, ‘How can you find something that will engage your audience, bring them in, and then how can we gently present to them the scientific content or the interesting concept we’re trying to get there?’ And if you go out too sort of stuffy, you just turn people off,” Gurr told the Telegraph.
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“Museums have always, perhaps, had a bit of a [reputation of] being dull and stuffy places, but they’re not. And actually, if you go back to the origins of these museums, they were the most exciting places in the world.”
Natural History Museum succeeds while many struggle for visitors
🟦 maxwell museum’s analysis
Congratulations to the Natural History Museum.
Is it the big-name, big-brand and big IP partnerships that have brought the crowds flocking in? Perhaps.
It’s very rare for specific exhibitions to move the needle on total numbers for venues of this scale. But with 133,000 visits to their David Attenborough immersive experience so far, and 177,000 to their Space exhibition over an 11-month run (to name two of last year’s highlights), perhaps Gurr has successfully created an overall ‘magic mix’ that brought in numbers greater than the sum of their parts.
Although, if you strip out from the figures those who only visited the newly-renovated gardens and not the museum building itself (that’s 800,000 people), the British Museum would once again be the UK’s most visited attraction for a third successive year.
In contrast, the ALVA figures will be sobering reading for many — the National Gallery especially.
Despite a 29% rise year-on-year, to 4.1m after the reopening of its Sainsbury Wing, they’re still tracking 31% behind 2019. They’ve announced staff cuts to tackle an £8.2m deficit. In a statement to the Art Newspaper, they blamed the shortfall on sluggish international visitors, which were around 1.7 million lower than in 2019. Because of this, the gallery will “make itself more welcoming and relevant to the British public” a spokesperson said.
The numbers also confirm why some high profile venues have made recent significant staff reductions. The Royal Academy is up 20% on 2024, yet they’re still an enormous 40% down on 2019. Last year they axed 60 jobs. Tate Modern is down 2% on 2024, and 26% on 2019, while Tate Britain is down 6% on 2024 and 35% on 2019. 7% of their workforce was cut last year. The Eden Project are 33% down on 2019, and 75 roles were deleted there.
There surely must be growing alarm too for Imperial War Museums. IWM London is 30% down on 2019, while two of their admission-charging venues continue to hugely lag pre-pandemic levels — Churchill War Rooms is 13% down, and HMS Belfast is 37% down. All three saw fewer visits last year than the year before too.
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Overall, the ALVA 2025 visitor figures do not offer much happy reading. It was only a 2% rise in visits across all venues (and still 5 million short on pre-pandemic). Growth the previous year was 3.4%. Perhaps in different circumstances this would not be so terrible, but the costs to run our institutions have skyrocketed, especially after the government whacked up NI contributions and the minimum wage.
Visitor numbers need to grow even faster then, to avoid cuts to spending.
Worryingly, 12 of the UK’s top 20 most visited saw their numbers go backwards last year. And the finances will not get better anytime soon due to the Iran war.
As ALVA director Bernard Donoghue said today, “2025 was financially the toughest since the pandemic.” Today’s figures hint that this year could be even tougher.