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| 65,000 works of art online and information about all of the Tate galleries. |
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Free galleries and museums |
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| Since 2001, many UK galleries have become largely free of charge, with a fee only for their newest shows. This is part of an ongoing move to make art accessible to all and not just a well-heeled, highly educated elite. Many galleries run education programmes for schools and their local community, so that people are actively encouraged into cultural spaces. The result has been millions more attendees in the past few years. |
So, where can you go?
There are hundreds of museums in the UK. Here we pick out just a few, and show the wide variety of buildings that have become arts spaces in the past few years. Just as former warehouses have turned into stylish loft apartments in many cities across the UK, so many buildings with quite different original uses have been reappropriated as galleries. Often this is linked with regeneration, as cities find new ways of thriving despite the end of the heavy industries like manufacture and shipping. |
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Regenerated Tate
The Tate Gallery has branches in Liverpool, St Ives, London Millbank (for UK art, including very recent work) and Tate Modern in an ex-power station on the South Bank (for international modern art). The Liverpool gallery is part of the Albert Dock, which first opened in 1846 and used to store tea, silk and spirits from the Far East. But by 1972 the buildings, already half derelict, were closed. In 1981 the Toxteth riots showed the urgency of regeneration in Liverpool, and as part of that work Tate Liverpool was planned. The gallery was opened in the early 90's, but not finally completed until 1998. The Gallery shows a wide mixture of modern and contemporary art, including photography, printmaking, video, performance and installation as well as painting and sculpture. It covers foreign as well as UK art and has worked with galleries across the world. |
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 Startling asymetry
In Manchester, another former docksite, Salford Quays, has been transformed into a cultural space. The Lowry Gallery is a brand new 21st century building, a startling asymmetrical shape on the skyline, that houses a theatre as well as gallery space. Sculptures of stacks of boxes, and enormous anchor chains casually scatter the path towards the Gallery, haunting the area with its industrial past. |
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 Old and new
In London free galleries include the Serpentine Gallery in a small pavilion-like building in the middle of Hyde Park, specialising in recent work. The Geffrye Museum resides in a former almshouse in East London. It exhibits interior design and marries old and new. The visitor goes through a series of rooms showing fashionable sitting rooms through the centuries from the 16th to the 20th century. You can also see them online. Over Christmas, each of the rooms is decorated as it would have been for Christmas in that century. The Geffrye also has changing exhibitions of recent work, and is involved in community education work. The larger and more famous Victoria & Albert museum also has a mixture of old and new design. |
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Curvaceous snail
The Baltic in Newcastle is another refurbishment of an abandoned industrial building. Sitting next to the ‘blinking eye’ bridge and a new opera house that looks like a giant snail of curvaceous glass, the building marks the beginning of a defined cultural quarter for Newcastle. Other galleries that have flourished in recent years and include the Walsall Gallery, the Walker Museum in Liverpool, and Modern Art Oxford.
These are just the tip of the iceberg – you can find out about over 3,000 museums and galleries on the 24 hour museum site which showcases the best museums from around the UK.
ACTIVITY: answer some questions about these texts
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