October 2025
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that lists some of the benefits that major London galleries and museums offer to people who buy their membership. It also shows the price of their annual membership in relation to the price of a single ticket. If you find yourself regularly paying for exhibitions at the same gallery or museum, it might be worth doing some maths to see if an annual pass will save you some money. There are other benefits to weigh up too, including members rooms to relax in, and interesting magazines sent to you through the post.
Click the links in column 2 for more information about specific memberships.
Whether you buy a pass, or a one off ticket, accessing all the blockbuster exhibitions on offer can be very expensive. Oliver Basciano recently wrote an interesting article for the Guardian about the ‘guerrilla scheme letting skint artists mass-share gallery membership cards’.
The good news though, is that most of the galleries and museums who hold blockbuster temporary exhibitions, also have galleries of world class permanent collections on show free of charge:
Serpentine Gallery (including the Pavilion)
Or how about viewing work at an auction house? You don’t need to be a buyer.
Or how about just picking an area of London and creating your own, free, commercial gallery tour. Open Google Maps, search for something like, ‘Commercial Galleries in Mayfair’ (or St James, Shoreditch, Hackney, Fitzrovia etc). Click on the galleries to see what they’re showing and when they are open, then build your route!