Visualised #1: Visitor figures for UK museums and galleries
This year we’re creating visualisations of cultural datasets. We’re kicking things off with these animated bar charts showing UK museum and gallery visits from 2004 to 2019.
First up, we’ve charted the annual figures to give an idea of overall visitor figures. Click the play button to start the race!
There’s not a huge amount of change around the top 5, but it’s interesting to see how overall attendance has grown over the years. It’s also worth mentioning we currently only have data up to Sept 2019.
We’ve also charted the monthly figures which shows a lot more fluctuation. You can really see the effect that certain blockbuster shows will have had on attendance. For instance, National Museum Liverpool’s Terracotta Warriors show in 2018 and the V&A’s Pink Floyd exhibition from May-Oct 2017.
Again, click play to start the race.
If you spot anything else of interest then let us know on Twitter at @onefurther.
Behind the scenes
The data comes from DCMS’s museums and galleries visitor figures which has figures for DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries only. Data was cleaned up and aggregated in Google Sheets and the charts were created using Flourish.
Alix came up with the idea for this visualisation and did the data-wrangling and most of the work. Chris provided feedback and minor tweaks.
Enjoyed that and want more?
Check out the others in our Visualised series (although if you’re reading this in Jan 2020 there won’t be much else to see yet).
Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll tell you when new ones are published, as well as what else we’ve been up to recently.