Tesseract Foundational Research: Audience Measurement
The DCMS Museum Visits Observatory
Every month, DCMS publishes visitor figures for the national museums and galleries it sponsors - and every month those numbers land as a spreadsheet, not a decision tool. We rebuilt the full statistical data set, January 2019 to March 2026, as an interactive observatory: 16 museum groups, site-level detail, pandemic closures marked, and recovery measured against each institution's own 2019 baseline. It is a working demonstration of the difference between reporting and insight, on data every cultural organisation already knows.
Loading the visits data set…
Why we built it
Cultural organisations are rich in data and short on analytical capacity. The DCMS monthly visits series is one of the sector's best openly published data sets, yet it circulates as static tables: no baselines, no seasonality context, no way for a trustee or a marketing team to answer the question they actually have, which is "are we back, and compared to what?" This observatory answers that question interactively for every DCMS-sponsored museum group, and does it with the disciplines we bring to commissioned measurement work: an explicit baseline (each group's own 2019), honest handling of gaps and closures rather than smoothing over them, and every underlying number one click away in an accessible table.
What the data shows
Recovery is uneven, and averages hide it. Across all DCMS-sponsored museums, visits in the year to March 2026 sit close to pre-pandemic levels, but the group-level picture ranges widely - and within a single group, site-level trajectories diverge further still. The Imperial War Museums breakdown illustrates the point: five branches with five different recovery curves, from a central-London gallery site to a wartime airfield and a moored warship, each with its own seasonality. A single aggregate would tell the leadership team almost nothing actionable; the disaggregated view shows exactly where audience growth is coming from. That is the general lesson we take into every measurement engagement: the value is rarely in the headline number, it is in the decomposition.
Method and reproducibility
The observatory is built directly from the official DCMS statistical data set, "Monthly and Quarterly Visits to DCMS-sponsored Museums and Galleries" (to March 2026), reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Missing months are shown as gaps, never interpolated; the pandemic closure period (March 2020 to May 2021) is marked on the chart rather than excluded; recovery percentages compare the latest 12 months against the same institution's calendar-2019 total, so no museum is judged against anyone else's baseline. The extraction is a single script from the published ODS file, and the full monthly table is viewable on this page - if you can see a number in the chart, you can read it in the table.
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We build measurement frameworks, dashboards and analytics capability for public-sector and cultural organisations - see our digital analytics and audience measurement service.
Independent, self-initiated open research. Source figures © Crown copyright, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This observatory is not endorsed by DCMS or any museum shown.
