Natural History Museum become the most popular UK tourist attraction in history
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm talking to Bernard Donoghue OBE, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. Today he has revealed the stars of the visitor attraction world, led by the Natural History Museum in London. And he looks ahead to the most exciting openings of 2026.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 20th of March. |
| 0:10.2 | And very much hot off the press this morning is the figures from the Association of Leading Visitor |
| 0:17.5 | Attractions. Yes, the name says it all about visitor numbers in 2025. Some really |
| 0:25.4 | interesting headlines on this, in particular, fact that, well, we're still slid be lagging behind |
| 0:31.6 | the figures for 2019. But the person who can tell me much more about this is the director, Bernard Donoghue, friend of the podcast and somebody who has given many, many hours of wisdom to me over the years. |
| 0:48.1 | Bernard, well, I'd like to say congratulations, but is it? |
| 0:52.0 | Well, I can't take any of the credit. |
| 0:53.5 | This is down to the individual attractions themselves. |
| 0:56.1 | You're right. |
| 0:56.7 | It's a slightly mixed picture, to be honest. |
| 0:59.4 | We saw the average increase of visitors to visitor attractions across the UK, indoor or outdoor, was only about 2%. |
| 1:06.9 | So quite modest growth and not the kind of growth that we used to see way back in the sort of late 90s, even just pre-pandemic. |
| 1:15.4 | However, a stunning figure is the Natural History Museum in London, which is in at number one, top of the pops. |
| 1:22.2 | It's the most visited visitor attraction in the whole of the UK. |
| 1:25.4 | But not only that, it achieved the most visitors of any visitor attraction in the whole of the UK. But not only that, it achieved the most visitors |
| 1:29.2 | of any visitor attraction in the UK ever. So it's a real record breaker. But you're right. We're not |
| 1:35.6 | back to 2019 visitor figures. And actually part of me thinks that's not particularly a problem, |
| 1:41.6 | because 2019 was such an outlier of a year. We had record |
| 1:46.7 | domestic tourism, record inbound tourism, no sense of a recession, no, it was pre-pandemic. |
| 1:52.8 | So in many ways, it was an odd benchmark. Tell me, first of all, how the Natural History Museum |
| 1:57.9 | did it, because I'm used to seeing at the top of the pile, |
| 2:06.3 | British Museum, fantastic collection of stuff. So why would people be going from central London down to South Kensington and spending their time there instead? Or maybe as well. |
... |
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