London: the Natural History Museum overtook Tate Modern in visits
2019: Tate had 6.1M visits, the Natural History Museum 5.42M. In 2025: 4.51M and 6.23M. These count visits, not unique people.
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Two major London museums followed different paths after the pandemic. By 2025, Tate Modern visits were 26% below 2019; the Natural History Museum's South Kensington site was 14.9% above it.
One scale from zero, millions of visits per calendar year. The 2020–2021 collapse remains visible. Two individual sites are compared.
- Tate Modern visits
2019: 6,098,340
- Tate Modern visits
2025: 4,514,266
- NHM South Kensington visits
2019: 5,423,932
- NHM South Kensington visits
2025: 6,233,309
All 12 published months are summed for each year, 2019–2025. One DCMS Table_1a vintage, through June 2026. Tate Modern, not the Tate group; South Kensington, excluding Tring. 2019 is the last full pre-pandemic year.
Provisional DCMS values, subject to revision. Counting methods vary by institution. Exhibitions, tourism, opening hours and refurbishment affect visits. These series do not show that people switched museums or that nature displaced art. Partial 2026 is not compared with full years.
A question for this picture
Does the difference remain after accounting for opening hours and exhibitions?