JULY/AUGUST 2025
Racketeering continues at the British Museum: just under a fiver for a small cup of coffee and eight quid for a ham and cheese roll. Cheating bastards you might think, but why should they care when they have a captive audience of six million hungry saps a year to fleece. These are not prices suggesting this is a museum owned by all the people for the benefit of all the people. Is it though, really? It’s all part of the same philosophy that sites a Michelin-starred chef’s restaurant in the National Gallery. Trustees must pay lip service to the belief that museums are most definitely for everyone but they know they’re not really. And so their policies reflect otherwise.
Also, the provision of women’s lavatories in the British Museum is hopelessly inadequate with routinely long queues back up the stairs from the basement often reaching the shopping centre above. Women should be complaining vigorously about this. This museum needs to get its basic priorities right before embarking on billion-quid revamps.
They also need to ban photography, which everywhere is a nuisance and an impediment to others’ concentration. Mobile telephones are the scourge of museums. There is an argument – perhaps not an especially solid one but nevertheless satisfying to one’s pique – that the swarms of tourists experiencing exhibits via their mobile telephones deserve to be fleeced when they get thirsty.