Tate Modern helps boost visitors

The blockbusting arrival of Tate Modern on Bankside has helped visitor figures to London's national museums and galleries shoot up 20 per cent during the last financial year.

Culture Secretary Chris Smith is optimistic that the trend will continue. "Following the recent Budget announcement on scrapping admission charges, I look forward to even better visitor numbers next year," he says.

Assuming that he achieves free admission to all the national museums and galleries - those that get Government subsidy - by the end of the year, then he may be right. And there are other reasons for optimism too.

Despite the recent rash of museum developments backed by the Lottery, there are still more to come. At one end of the scale is the Natural History Museum's £100million Darwin Centre due to open in the summer of 2002.

At the other is the refurbishment of the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill now in progress. Its four-month closure accounts for a fall in visitor figures from 190,000 in 1999-2000 to 120,000 in the following year.

Only two other London museums saw a drop in visitors in 2000-2001 compared with the previous year: the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The maritime museum's drop may be due to its Neptune court development opening in 1999, which lifted annual attendance figures from 500,000 to 860,000. In that context, last year's 800,000 can be seen as still a huge increase on two years before.

Overall, the figures are dominated by the huge public response to Tate Modern. The final attendance figure for its first year is expected to be in excess of five million, putting London's first museum of modern art ahead of the National Gallery as the capital's most popular art gallery.

It is only surpassed by the British Museum, which enjoyed a modest increase in visitors attracted perhaps by the opening of its grand Great Court development. The museum remains top of the list at 5.7 million.

The old Tate Gallery on Millbank, reinvented as Tate Britain but denuded of its Impressionists, Picassos and other popular paintings, has seen attendances drop from 1.8 million to 1.2 million. However, Tate Britain's Lottery-backed £32million centenary redevelopment opens in October.

There were increases in attendance at the National Portrait Gallery and Wallace Collection, both of which had improvements of 18 per cent and 16 per cent respectively.