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British Museum: More Fun Than the Beach

by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 6 Jul 2008 at 3:45 PM

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When it comes to the modern leisure seeker, neither the seaside nor the delights of the country's best modern art museum are quite as tempting as the meaty displays on offer at the British Museum. Funny — I used to see the British Museum as the boring place my family always visited on holiday in London.

Well, either times or people have changed— or, perhaps more logically, the museum has — to make it the nation's most popular cultural attraction, new figures for 2007–08 show. The museum saw 6.04 million visitors, an increase of more than 1 million over the 12 months previous.

To compare, a measly 5.23 million people visited Tate Modern in 2007, and 5.5 million made it to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, the nation's favorite and most famous bit of sand and popular entertainment site.

Of course, 2008 was a particularly sweet year for the British Museum because of the "Terracotta Army" exhibit. Nearly 900,000 people came to view and learn about the splendors of the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, China's first. Who said anything about dumbing down?

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