Museum and Gallery Visits in England

Taking Part, which has been run since 2005, collects data about participation in sport, the arts, heritage, libraries, museums and galleries from adults and children (aged 5-15) in England. The figures show that visiting to museums and galleries is on a steady upward trend, with the increase in visitation / decline in non-visitation being statistically significant:

So, somewhere in the region of 42-46% of adults in England visit a museum or gallery at least once in a given year (and this doesn’t include Heritage sites, which are visited at least once a year by a whopping 70% of English adults).

This fairly steady overall picture conceals considerable variation by geography, demographics and socioeconomic status:

Age and gender breakdowns are pretty self-explanatory, and broadly reflect Australian trends (although ABS uses slightly different age categories). London residents are the most likely to visit museums while those in the East Midlands (which incorporates my English ‘hometown’ of Leicester) are the least likely in 2010-11. Interestingly, the East Midlands is the only region to see a fall in participation rates from 2005-6, albeit not a significant drop. It would be interesting to see how the different regional increases correspond to the opening / refurbishment of museums across England over the past few years.

Demographic and socioeconomic data show that museum and gallery visitors are still disproportionately white, wealthy and able-bodied:

Participation rates among lower socioeconomic groups, ethnic minorities, disabled people and people of non-Christian religions are all on the increase, which will be encouraging news for all those who have put so much effort into social inclusion projects in museums over the past decade or so. However, given the increases in participation across-the-board, it’s not clear whether there is any progress being made in closing long-standing cultural gaps.

NB: I tried to do a compare-and-contrast between the Taking Part report and the Attendance at Cultural Venues statistics published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but I ended up tying myself in knots. First off, the ABS report cites participation rates for Art Galleries and Museums separately (with each being in the low-mid 20% range – see here for more details). Where a combined rate is given, it appears that the figure has been reached by simply adding Museum and Gallery figures together (See for instance Table 8.1 in the ABS report (PDF), despite saying in the explanatory notes that the true proportion will be less than the sum of Museums + Galleries due to overlap between the visitor populations of each – as you’d expect. I’m actually wondering whether the wrong numbers were published in the report!). Either way, I suspect the 46-52% annual participation rates cited by ABS are an overestimate.