London’s Natural History Museum has claimed the title of the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction, overtaking the British Museum, new data reveals.
The South Kensington institution welcomed 7.1 million visitors in 2025, a 13 per cent increase from the previous year.
This figure represents an all-time high for any UK museum or gallery, according to trade body Alva.
A significant draw was the NHM’s Fixing Our Broken Planet exhibition on climate change, which opened in April 2025 and attracted over two million visitors.
It has become the free museum’s second most-popular space, after its renowned dinosaur exhibits.
NHM director Dr Doug Gurr said that the museum was “thrilled” with the figures, which he said demonstrate “the enormous public appetite to engage with the wonders of the natural world”.
Across the UK, popular tourist attractions collectively recorded 165.2 million visits last year. While a 2 per cent rise from 161.4 million in the preceding year, overall visitor numbers remain 7 per cent below pre-Covid levels from 2019.
Alva director Bernard Donoghue said the shortfall was partly because the number of Chinese visitors has only recovered to 80 per cent of the amount seen before the pandemic.
He blamed this on the the decision made by the Conservative government in 2020 to end tax-free shopping for inbound visitors, which he described as “an act of economic self-harm”.
He said: “We’re now seeing the effect of that in terms of the UK not being the top choice for people from China.
“We’ve got 80 per cent of the Chinese market that we had in 2019, but Italy and Spain are at 120-125 per cent of the visitors that they had from China in 2019.
“It’s not that the Chinese visitors aren’t flying long-haul, but they are going to places where they can get a really good deal.”
The British Museum in central London was the second most-visited attraction in the UK, with 6.4 million visits.
In third place was Windsor Great Park, Berkshire, with 5 million visits.
The most popular attraction in Scotland was Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland (2.3 million visits) while the number one spot in Wales was taken by St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff (570,000 visits).
Titanic Belfast had the most visits out of Northern Ireland’s attractions, with more than 950,000.
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