Merriman has changed his tune. “The statistics show that, actually, for the national museums not charging has increased numbers vastly, but it hasn’t done much in terms of widening the audience. So you just get more middle class people going,” he tells me. “In principle, why not charge? Most people, for the national museums, are willing to pay, just as they are for the National Theatre or for National Trust properties, or English Heritage properties.”
There are others like him who would be prepared to slay this sacred cow. “I’m not opposed to free entry, but I don’t think it has to be free for everybody, as it were, 24/7 or 365,” says Roy Clare, who was director of state-sponsored Royal Museums Greenwich when public museum admission fees were abolished. “I think we need a more sophisticated approach to it. And so my instinct 25 years on is we must not bar people from accessing their collections. But that doesn’t mean it has to be free all the time.”
Clare, who later served as director of the Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand, says that crowding at museums has become “horrendous” at busy periods, such as weekends and school holidays, and tells me that he would like to see the introduction of entry fees for peak times in a similar vein to the transport industry. ““You could easily ensure that dynamic works so that people who want to access their collections plan to visit them on days when it’s free, and they don’t visit on days when it’s crowded,” he says.
Wasfi Kani, a former British Museum trustee, says that she goes to “a lot of museums, everywhere, around the world and the great museums charge – and they charge quite a lot… The world’s changing. We’ve got to change”.
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