Written on 29 July 2025.
Tate’s two London galleries have shown a 27% drop in visitor figures which Maria Balshaw, Tate’s director, blames on Covid and leaving the EU.
She said the two factors had combined to discourage 16 to 24 year olds from visiting Tate Britain and Tate Modern, which have shown a drop of 2.2m visitors since 2019, when there were a record 6.1m visitors.
Internal research had shown, she said, that domestic visitor numbers are at 95% of pre-Covid levels, but international numbers are only at 61%.
“The figures speak for themselves,” she told the Art Newspaper “Tate Modern alone welcomed 609,000 visitors from Europe, between ages 16 to 24, in 2019-20 but then 357,000 in 2023-24.
“And if you think about that age of person: they are profoundly affected by the combination of Brexit changing their educational and work opportunities and then Covid profoundly affecting the end of their studies and the way they choose to live their lives. They are, in general, also travelling less.”
Meanwhile, Tate Modern, which this year is celebrating it 25th anniversary, is hoping to entice more young people by staying open till 9pm on Friday and Saturday.
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