Fiona MacLeod on London’s extraordinary free cultural offer, from the British Museum to the South Bank
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Fiona MacLeod | The London Prat
London is an expensive city in many respects. Accommodation is expensive. Restaurants at the upper end of the quality range are expensive. A round of drinks at a central London pub has reached a price point that causes even locals to pause. But London has one extraordinary characteristic that visitors from cities with entrance fees on everything often do not anticipate: the majority of its world-class cultural institutions are free.
The British Museum, the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Modern, the Tate Britain, the Science Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London, the Wallace Collection, the Sir John Soane Museum, the National Maritime Museum, and approximately thirty other museums and galleries of significant quality are free to enter, all day, every day, funded primarily by the British government on the principle that the cultural heritage they hold belongs to everyone and should be accessible to everyone. This principle, which other countries have not universally adopted, makes London one of the world’s most extraordinary cities for free cultural experience.
The Free Route
A visitor to London could spend three full days moving between major free cultural institutions and still not see everything worth seeing, which is a remarkable statement about the density of the city’s cultural offer. A practical route for first-time visitors: start with the British Museum for the ancient world collections, the Elgin Marbles, and the Reading Room; walk to the National Gallery for the European paintings; take the Tube or walk the South Bank to the Tate Modern for the modern and contemporary work; walk across the Millennium Bridge and back for the view. This is a full day and costs nothing except transport and whatever you spend at the cafe.
The Natural History Museum is essential for any visitor with children and for any visitor without children who is honest about still finding the dinosaurs impressive, which is everyone. The Victoria and Albert Museum is the world’s best decorative arts museum and is so large that a full visit is impossible in a single day. The free galleries of the Royal Academy are worth noting as a supplement to these institutions. Visit London has the complete museum listings with current exhibition information. The London Prat covers London culture with the enthusiasm of a publication that uses these institutions regularly. The museums are extraordinary. They are free. Go to all of them. This advice is impossible to follow and worth following as far as you can.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
London rewards the visitor who arrives prepared and the resident who never stops paying attention. The city is too large and too alive to fully know, which is precisely the right size for a city that wants to remain interesting over a lifetime of engagement with it.
More London: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
