Natural History Museum becomes UK’s top attraction for visits

London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) has set a new record as it becomes the UK’s most visited tourist attraction, new figures show.

The site welcomed 7.1 million visitors in 2025, which is up 13% from the previous year and represents an all-time high for a UK museum or gallery, trade body the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva) said.

The NHM’s Fixing Our Broken Planet exhibition on climate change, which opened in April 2025, has seen more than two million visitors.

It has become the free museum’s second most visited space, after its dinosaur exhibits.

NHM director Dr Doug Gurr said it was “thrilled” with the figures, which demonstrate “the enormous public appetite to engage with the wonders of the natural world”.

There were a total of 165.2 million visits to 409 of the most popular UK tourist attractions last year.

That is up 2% from 161.4 million during the previous year but remains 7% below pre-coronavirus levels in 2019.

Bernard Donoghue, Alva director, said the shortfall was partly because the number of Chinese visitors has only recovered to 80% of the amount seen before the virus crisis.

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 told the Press Association: “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% of the Chinese market that we had in 2019, but Italy and Spain are at 120-125% 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 second most-visited attraction in the UK was the British Museum in central London, with 6.4 million visits.

In third place was Windsor Great Park, Berkshire, with 5.0 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.