From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
London’s big museums have had a good autumn. The British Museum’s inaugural Met Gala-style ball not only raised £2.5 million, but announced a £10.3 million pledge from the Garfield Weston Foundation for new ‘welcome pavilions’ in Bloomsbury. The Science Museum secured £10 million from Indian vaccine giant the Serum Institute – its biggest ever international donation – to revamp its Making the Modern World gallery. And to top it all, the National Gallery announced that a new wing would be largely funded by two gifts of £150 million each – far outstripping the previous record for the biggest cash donation to a museum. With Labour having lived up to its no-promises manifesto and left the Conservatives’ austerity largely intact, these big gifts are a shot in the arm. Could 2025 really be the year that US-style philanthropy finally reached the shores of little Blighty?
The differences with the United States are still stark. These big donations are all tightly restricted to capital projects – whereas key US institutions have far greater access to unrestricted funds. The Met, for instance, used $259.7 million of donated income to fund museum operations in 2024–25. This included $93.9 million of assets released from donor restrictions. The scale of US cultural endowments allows vast investment, reassuring accountants that operational spending can be sustained. One of the few options UK museums have for raising unrestricted funds is through visitor membership schemes: last year, the Tate’s scheme – the largest such one – brought in £15.6 million, while the V&A’s equivalent earned £10.5 million.
Like their US counterparts, the names of Britain’s most generous art patrons are explicitly embossed on the institutions they support: Len Blavatnik at Tate Modern, the Gettys at the National Gallery and the Sainsburys at both the National Gallery and the British Museum. The new wings they financed all increased visitor footfall and allowed greater space for chargeable exhibitions in the age of free museum entry. But they also come with increased running costs that would be unlikely to be met by the Treasury cheque book at any time – let alone in the current fiscal climate. Add that burden to ballooning energy costs, staff demands for inflation-level pay rises and unexpected repair bills, and museums are facing a perfect storm that the current philanthropy boom might struggle to address.
The biggest donation to a British institution in the most recent financial year did not come in cash. The Sir Percival David Foundation’s bequest of 1,700 Chinese ceramics to the British Museum was valued at £915 million – but it had already been loaned to the museum since 2009. Though its sheer scale dwarfs everything and anything, it is this manner of gift that most museums in Britain would recognise. At the National Galleries of Scotland, 60 per cent of donations last year came in the form of artwork. Director-general Anne Lyden believes the prospect of private income paying a substantial share of running costs is ‘very unlikely’ in the foreseeable future. ‘For a lot of donors there’s still a sense that the running costs are very much the responsibility of the government or the local authority,’ she says. She cites the People’s Postcode Lottery as an exception, ‘something that I think the sector very much appreciates and sees as something that is vital, but it is in the minority’.
Before joining the NGS in 2013 and taking the top job last year, Lyden spent 18 years at the Getty in Los Angeles. This gave her ‘an understanding and awareness of the culture of donations and the gift scheme there’ that allows donors to minimise their tax liabilities. She believes many philanthropists are not aware of Britain’s cultural gifts scheme, which allows taxpayers to donate works of art and heritage objects and receive a share of the value in lessened tax.
Her time in the United States has also helped her liaise with the NGS’s long-established American patrons scheme, which the organisation shares with the National Library of Scotland. Such US patronage programmes have been a fixture since the 1980s. The National Gallery in London’s version kicked off with J. Paul Getty II’s £50 million donation in 1985. US benefactors later provided almost two thirds of the £134 million cost of converting Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern in the late 1990s.
Donors might be ‘interested in specific projects’ and the ‘transformative impact they will have’, V&A director Tristram Hunt says, but museums can work with that. ‘How much we get from the government relative to our overall budget is just progressively falling. So we have to be more entrepreneurial,’ he says. Hunt speaks of private donor funding for educational programmes like DesignLab Nation – focused on design and technology students in cities outside of London. V&A Dundee, which is a separate charity, was primarily funded by the Scottish Government last year but it attracted support from a number of trusts. Exhibitions were sponsored by Arnold Clark, Dalmore whisky and media giants D.C. Thomson. For V&A East Storehouse in Stratford, ‘naming gifts’ were secured from Frédéric Jousset and David and Molly Lowell Borthwick.
But is it a struggle to persuade donors to support work that doesn’t get their names on the wall? ‘It varies with what people want,’ says Hunt, explaining that some of the museum’s biggest supporters prefer to remain anonymous anyway. ‘I can think of a very generous donor who’s worked with the V&A for almost a decade, funding the professional development and training of curators and conservators. He feels they should have those opportunities, you know, for research, for travel, for conferences, for work. And that’s a really directed, sophisticated, helpful contribution to the budget of the organisation.’
That is what’s now called ‘impact philanthropy’, which is being championed at Westminster thanks to the intervention of the Beacon Collaborative, a group of philanthropists and charities developing a national giving strategy. High-net-worth individuals and trusts increasingly ‘wish to manage more of their wealth in ways that align with the social or environmental impact they want to see’, the Beacon Collaborative says.
Hunt is concerned, however, that new inheritance tax rules for ‘non doms’ are ‘frightening global capital away from London’ – which will ‘hurt cultural giving’. The reported floods of ‘Donald Dasher’ US billionaires moving to London, though, are less likely to be deterred by the stricter tax rules introduced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves last year. That’s because Americans pay tax on their worldwide income, and can wriggle out of British inheritance tax thanks to a bilateral treaty.
The costs of individual exhibitions have long been supported by corporate sponsors, but recent accusations of ‘art washing’ have made both museums and corporations more hesitant. Lyden notes too that ‘values-led’ corporations ‘are looking to give those funds directly to local groups’ rather than to national institutions. She seems regretful about the ‘pushback’ against corporate partnerships. ‘I think there’s an expectation that there’s a better, cleaner source of funding available, and the data just doesn’t hold up to that,’ she says. ‘There isn’t an abundance of choices for organisations […] Many of them are really in a position of precarity.’
Museums are instead looking to the same philanthropic trusts that support capital projects. Tate’s fundraising income rose to £41.7 million last year, and that included support from the Julia Rausing Trust and the Christian Levett Collection for the women artists exhibition ‘Now You See Us’, while the Yoko Ono show was backed by London-based US investment banker John J. Studzinski.
Much as the national museums complain of government belt-tightening, some would say they have it easy. While grant-in-aid funding for arts and culture organisations fell by 18 per cent from 2010 to 2023, local government support fell by 48 per cent in England, and 40 per cent in Wales. Spending in the UK is increasingly sucked up by statutory services like schools and social care, leaving ‘discretionary’ regional museums picking up the crumbs.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy hopes that ‘place-based philanthropy’ – local donors supporting local institutions – will help plug the gap. The Beacon Collaborative says there’s a lot of work to be done here, like offering professional support to civil society organisations and pushing local leaders and civic mayors to take the initiative. Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross has supported museums in Lincoln, while Hunt cites ‘proper, proper gifts’ from the wealthy Bamford and Stafford families, as well as the Coates family, who founded bet365, when he worked with the V&A to save the Wedgwood Collection as MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. But it is still the exception rather than the rule. Recent local museum refurbishments have instead been funded directly from Westminster – such as Perth Museum, which benefited from the Tay Cities Region deal. That effectively leaves councils competing against each other.
‘I think we all feel the real pressure our colleagues in regional museums are under,’ says Hunt. And I think it is harder to raise philanthropic funds outside of London. That’s why when we are offered works of art or gifts, we do always say, this might work better at the local regional museum.’
Lyden believes there is a ‘very real risk of regional inequalities’ as ‘especially international donors are more likely to go to London’. That’s the nature of ‘more corporate headquarters’ and high net worth individuals in the capital. But Lyden says that institutions elsewhere can shout louder about the impact that funding them will have. She points to the inclusion of a print of Norah Neilson Gray’s Mother and Child (1920s) in the Scottish Government’s Baby Box, issued to every family north of the border on the birth of a child. ‘For potential funders and donors, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about being a good ancestor. It’s about how the decisions that are made today will benefit future generations.’
The National Gallery believes success in London will lift the prospects of the cultural sector elsewhere – and encourage greater support from government and private donors alike. The alternative, of course, is that government sees a sector increasingly able to fend for itself, and a public good that already plays second fiddle to schools and hospitals suffers more. And a sector more dependent on private investment becomes more dependent on the whims of investors – including regionally.
One way to ensure private donations do not deter government spending is match funding – which the Beacon Collaborative wants to be regionally targeted. Its report cites the success of Arts Council England match funding between 2012 and 2017, when 17 organisations including the Glasshouse in Gateshead and Margate’s Turner Contemporary were incentivised to generate funds in 25-year endowments of more than £52 million. They now have annual returns from 2.5 to 6 per cent, bringing in regular income that can support running costs.
Donors will always expect, says Hunt, that ‘running costs – security and lighting and heating and all that kind of stuff – are part of the taxpayer contribution’. But if they continue to rise, how long can that be sustained? Eventually museums will be forced to either take a more confrontational line with government, or be straight with their donors that they want money without strings.
Much as the zeros have totted up on the cheques, the London experience of philanthropy remains rather piecemeal – and quintessentially British.
From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.