Some say people should pay to get into museums. some say it be free...

We should pay to get into museums

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In 1867, Mark Twain visited the Paris Exhibition, where he saw a marvelous automaton displayed by a jeweller called Harry Emanuel. Like all those lucky enough to clap eyes on this particular mechanical creature, Twain fell deeply under its spell, an experience he later recorded in his book The Innocents Abroad: “I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes; watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass rather than a jeweller’s shop; watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.” Impossible to believe, from his description, that this enchanting routine lasted a mere 40 seconds – unless you happen to have seen it yourself.

I have seen it many times, for the Silver Swan resides, as he has done for more than half his long life, at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, to which he was brought in 1872 by its passionate, generous and far-sighted founders, John Bowes, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Strathmore, and his wife, Joséphine Chevalier, Countess of Montalbo.

In the 21st century, still quite content on his stream of twisted glass rods, he dives every day at two o’clock in the afternoon. A door is opened. A handle is turned. Music box bells begin to chime. Having undergone a thorough restoration in 2008, his movement is as deft as it ever was, comically pernickety but also elegant, even a little raffish. He twists his head left and right, he preens himself, and then – the sudden glint of sunlight on polished metal – he dips his neck. How can something so swift be so unforgettable? Sometimes, the gathered crowd finds itself so astonished by his antics, it breaks into applause.

It costs an adult £10.50 to clap eyes on this wondrous bird. Does this sound a lot? I know that it does, for all that he nests among paintings by Canaletto, Goya and El Greco; that on the banks of his stream are priceless collections of porcelain, furniture and fabrics. But I also think that there is a chastening value in the inward wince a person may experience as they hand over their credit card in this, or any other, public treasure house. The totting up of pounds and pence cannot, and should not, be separated from what it is you are in reality paying for.

This isn’t just a way to eat up a rainy afternoon. It’s not even a means of bagging a place beside a clockwork toy as its keeper winds it up. You are buying the future, slapping a preservation order on the lovely and the magical. How much does this swan’s upkeep cost? Who looks after it and who pays their wages? Who, above all, will ensure it paddles on into another decade, even into another century? Whether you like it or not, the answer to the last question is: you.

In York, a great fuss has blown up. The city’s art gallery, which is about to reopen after an expensive redevelopment, is to charge visitors a £7.50 entrance fee. This step, it says, isn’t one it took “lightly or willingly”, and should be set in the context of a fall in the funding it receives from the council, a figure that has plummeted over the past three years from £1.5m to £600,000. Some of those who are fussing live in York and have a decent argument to make about the relative unfairness of charging residents and tourists alike the same sum.

Others live elsewhere and fear that their towns and cities will blindly follow suit. After all, local authority funding for museums and galleries has declined nationwide from about £310m in 2010 to £240m in 2014. Either way, people are upset.

On the York Press website, commentators railed at the York Museums Trust for its “dishonesty” and shortsightedness. They predicted, somewhat gleefully, that visitor numbers would now fall dramatically. One even likened its philistine attitude to art to that of the Nazi regime.

I can’t go along with all this. The last free gallery I visited that was new to me was the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent. As I walked around it, half swooning at its collections – not without reason did A N Wilson once describe it as the greatest museum in the world – two things occurred to me. The first was that, on this rainy weekday morning, I was one of only half-a-dozen people in its ceramics galleries; its entrance policy did not seem to be having much of a positive effect on its gate. The second was that I felt ashamed. Standing in front ofthe Minton peacock, a huge earthenware sculpture from 1873 that has come to rival the Silver Swan in my gallery-going affections, I felt badly that I’d shoved only a fiver into the donation bucket on my way in.

I work. I’m not in (much) debt. I believe, in a quite appallingly sentimental way, in art and all that it can do for people and places. I should pay up and well. In the high days of New Labour, when money seemed to grow on trees, I used to bang on about the “miracle” of its decision to scrap entrance fees at our national museums. But the word has different connotations for me now. The real miracle is that such madness has lasted this long.

It seems pretty rum to me that it is precisely the people who complain that London sucks all the money when it comes to arts funding who go nuts when their supposedly beloved local institutions attempt to redress the balance a little. People worry about exclusion or they say they do.

This is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. The truth is that, while visitor numbers to many museums have increased since 1997, their profile has changed not a jot. They remain, in large part, middle class, educated, in work. I don’t see why those people – people like me – shouldn’t help to subsidise the less well off, to fund not only the concessions that must be maintained for children, pensioners and students, but also – this is so much more important – to pay the salaries of those working hard to bring in new social groups: the curators, the youth workers, the people who run educational programmes.

If you like visiting galleries, and are lucky enough to be able to afford to do it on a regular basis, why not share the love? John and Josephine Bowes died before their splendid museum opened, but hundreds of people still feel their generosity every week. It falls on them like a blessing, in the flash of a silver bird’s wings.