Where are the kids exhibitions? Exploring a gap in the museum market

At the end of 2024 I was commissioned to survey and analyse the paid exhibition market across London’s museums and galleries. I reviewed almost 150 exhibitions staged between 2021 and 2024 at 16 attractions: Barbican Art Gallery, British Library, British Museum, the Design Museum, Horniman Museum and Gardens, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Academy, Science Museum, Somerset House, Southbank Centre (Hayward Gallery), Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A and Wellcome Collection.

If you work in the sector you won’t be surprised to learn that 70% of the exhibitions in the sample were art exhibitions (including fashion, design and photography) and almost a quarter were world history and cultures exhibitions. All of these were targeted towards an adult audience.

This begs the question: what’s happened to the exhibitions for kids?

Where are the child-friendly exhibitions?

Within the sample 5% of the exhibitions appeared to be designed for children. A few of these were art exhibitions, most were science shows and none were historical.

As an aside, I would question whether the art exhibitions for children really were for children? Do kids today care about Beatrix Potter and the Beano? Or were these exhibitions programmed out of a sense of nostalgia by the curators?

Anyway my point is the paucity of paid exhibitions at London’s top museums and galleries that are curated for kids was a big surprise to me so I think it’s worth a bit of investigation. What might be the reasons for this?

Is there a business case for children’s exhibitions?

Perhaps there’s no business case for paid exhibitions for children? Paid exhibitions are an important source of income for museums and galleries. They’re expensive to stage but a blockbuster can generate serious revenue. You just have to look at the V&A’s annual reports to see that some V&A shows sell hundreds of thousands of tickets. Multiply that by the ticket price and that’s millions of pounds of income before you even factor in secondary spend in the gift shop and income generated by touring a show to other institutions around the world. And that’s before you consider lucrative sponsorship deals. In reality most exhibitions barely wash their faces financially which naturally creates a sense of risk aversion amongst museum and gallery decision makers. So maybe it’s simply that once you crunch the numbers for a kids exhibition, a museum can’t justify the investment.

Are free events and activities meeting the need?

Perhaps children, families and schools are best served with free events and activities? If there’s something London’s museums and galleries do brilliantly it’s free programming for family and school groups. And shout out to the smaller institutions too whose world class activities are delivered on a shoe string budget. If you’re investing resources into catering for children through a free offer, why bother with an exhibition for children too? Especially when most museums and galleries will tell you they deliver much of their societal impact through working with schools and families. (If you’re not familiar with how museums and galleries operate, work with schools and families is sometimes talked about like a CSR activity.)

Is there bias at play?

Or perhaps curators and decision makers just don’t want to programme exhibitions for children? Each museum and gallery has its own model for deciding the exhibition programme. More often than not there’s some sort of “exhibition committee” that assesses proposals from curators and others against a range of criteria from audience appeal and academic robustness to commercial potential. Maybe there just aren’t that many genuinely great proposals for child-focused exhibitions or maybe the proposals that make it to the committees aren’t viable. Or maybe there’s a bias against coming up with excellent ideas for child-friendly exhibitions in the first place.

Challenging the business case argument

I don’t buy the business case argument. I’ve worked on some truly excellent exhibitions for children notably Fire! Fire! at the old Museum of London and Wallace & Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas at the Science Museum, both many moons again. Fire! Fire! especially was a commercial success as well as being a great experience for family and school groups.

Families do spend money on experiences

It’s no exaggeration to say that millions of children visit London’s top museums and galleries each year as part of family or school groups. The spending power of families is enormous. Yes, it’s a stretch for many families to cover the cost of transport and lunch on a day out, let alone by an exhibition ticket too. But there’s plenty of families able to spend a reasonably large amount on a day out at a museum or gallery.

And if you look at a wider set of London attractions there are loads of examples of commercial attractions designed for kids with new ones opening regularly. Just yesterday I noticed a poster on the tube for a new Minecraft Experience in Canada Water, The Paddington Bear Experience opened not too long ago and Instagram-friendly attractions like the Twist Museum seem to be opening up everywhere. Attractions like these require huge investment so the decision to fund them is not taken lightly without a strong business case. Yes, the London KidZania closed in recent years and I’m not sure why but it had a good run.

It’s worth noting as well that Wonderlab at the Science Museum and Mudlarks at London Museum Docklands now charge an entry fee. Neither are exhibitions per se, but this is an interesting development nonetheless.

And let’s not forget Young V&A, which reopening in 2023 after a major refurbishment, designed entirely for kids. I don’t know about the exhibitions specifically, but Young V&A must be doing something right. Whenever I walk past it in the school holidays (it is around the corner from my home) there are families queueing around the block.

Impact and resources

I have some sympathy for the impact argument. Museum and gallery funding is tight. For institutions that already invest large amounts providing free activities for families and schools you can understand why it might not wish to fund an expensive exhibition for children too.

Final thoughts

So does this mean there’s a bias against staging paid exhibitions for children? Yes I think there probably is. Content for adults is seen by many museum and gallery teams as being sexier, exciting and ultimately more prestigious. This is almost definitely why there are currently so few museum and gallery exhibitions for children in London these days.

It’s not that I’m campaigning for more exhibitions for kids. And I know first hand that most exhibitions are a hard sell often making a loss. It’s just that there’s very clearly a massive gap in the market for paid exhibitions created for kids. I’m surprised very few of London’s top museums and galleries seem willing to fill it.