Most-visited London Attractions 2025 1) Natural History Museum (7,116,929) [↑13%] 2) British Museum (6,440,120) [↓1%] 3) Windsor Great Park (4,978,299) [↓12%] 4) Tate Modern (4,514,266) [↓2%] 5) National Gallery (4,147,544) [↑29%] 6) Southbank Centre (3,423,648) [↓8%] 7) V&A South Kensington (3,332,300) [↓5%] 8) Somerset House (2,895,010) [↓6%] 9) Tower of London (2,817,852) [↓3%] 10) Science Museum (2,640,417) [↓7%]
I have issues with Windsor Great Park being an 'attraction' given you can easily wander in from the town centre, maybe staying only a couple of minutes. If you too have issues and would rather ignore it, the current number 11 is Royal Museums Greenwich with 2,364,348 visitors.
Other than Windsor Great Park the top 10 are all in London. The busiest attraction elsewhere is the National Museum of Scotland in 12th place. The only paid-for attraction in the top 10 is the Tower of London. The second-busiest attraction that charges is Kew Gardens (officially Royal Botanic Gardens Kew) which is in 13th place.
The big news this year is that the Natural History Museum has taken the top spot. It's also the highest ever annual total in an ALVA survey, nowhere's ever topped 7 million before. People sure like dinosaurs, and of course stuffed birds, blue whales and meteorites. It's probably not a coincidence that of the three South Kensington museums (NHM, V&A, Sci), the one with the faffiest admission procedure has the lowest total.
It's important to note that the rankings only include ALVA members and lots of attractions aren't. The London Eye doesn't appear, nor the Shard, Madame Tussauds or Dangleway. The Eye would be somewhere around 7th if it were included. It probably is true that the top three are correct but the Science Museum isn't really 10th, nor is Tower Bridge precisely 39th.
The best thing is that ALVA have been collecting this data for years so we can look back to see how things have changed. Here are the top 6 London attractions since 2020.
The Natural History Museum has been top before, in 2022, and seems to be locked in an ongoing title battle with the British Museum. Tate Modern has held a fairly consistent 3rd place lately. Also note that the National Gallery is on the up, this likely because the Sainsbury wing reopened last year after a lengthy revamp.
Note the utterly atypical data during the pandemic. Kew Gardens grabbed the top spot in 2021, a year with ongoing indoor restrictions, because they're an outdoor attraction. Windsor Great Park was way ahead of everywhere else that year, attracting almost three times as many visitors as any other attraction. In no other year would a community woodland on the outskirts of Gravesend have been the 10th most visited attraction in the country.
But we can do better than six years. ALVA's been collecting data since 2004 so here's the entire London Top 10 over the last 20 years. (Yes it's tiny, but click the graphic to see a full size version)
The British Museum (light blue) ruled the roost from 2007 to 2017 and has been either first or second in every year except the pandemic. The National Gallery (orange) was always top three until the pandemic and has stumbled a little since. Tate Modern (green) faltered a little in the mid 2010s but is now back in contention again.
It's interesting to compare the Natural History Museum (magenta) and Science Museum (brown), two neighbours on Exhibition Road. To make it easier to compare, they're the ones with white text. From 2005 to 2011 they were neck and neck, the NHM marginally ahead. Since 2013 they've started edging apart, initially not by much but the gap is now a massive eight places. The split happened before the Science Museum insisted on issuing free tickets, so maybe it's just that people prefer animals to abstract concepts. Even the V&A (pink) has now leapfrogged the Science Museum, the switchover coming in the mid 2010s.
Be aware that the Southbank Centre (yellow) didn't materialise out of nowhere in 2014, that's just the year they joined ALVA. Likewise the London Eye blinked out after 2005 because that's when they suspended their membership. All the precise machinations should really be taken with a pinch of salt.
Likewise these are not really London's five least visited attractions...
1) The Monument (102,014) 2) Eltham Palace and Gardens (106,135) 3) Kenwood House (123,440) 4) Guildhall Art Gallery (128,968) 5) WWT London (147,397)
...partly because other non-ALVA members score lower, and partly because I chose to ignore the Serpentine Lido (13,103), Greenwich Park Boating Lake (21,465) and Regent's Park Boating Lake (75,106) because they're silly.
To round off my analysis I've averaged the rankings of all the London attractions over the last 20 years.
Top London Attractions 2005-2025 1) The One With Mummies 2) The One With Splotches 3) The One With Dinosaurs 4) The One With Sunflowers 5) The One With Cast Courts
Feel free to boost your favourite museum's chances in 2026.
