Cash donations to the Natural History Museum more than doubled in 2021/22, as it continued to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The latest accounts for the museum, which is an exempt charity, show it received £6.3m in public donations in the year to March 2022, up from £2.6m in 2020/21. The figure was £6.7m in the year to March 2020, before the pandemic took hold.
Income from admissions and membership also rose sharply, from £1m to £5.2m, as the museum welcomed back visitors after lockdowns.
The museum partly reopened in May 2021 and fully reopened in July, the accounts say, after a series of national and local lockdowns meant the charity was closed for several months after March 2020 because of the outbreak.
The accounts, published this week, show that total income at the museum rose by 18 per cent, from £82.4m in 2020/21 to £97.4m in 2021/22.
This is higher than the £92m income recorded in 2019/20, before the impact of Covid-19.
The rise was also driven by higher trading income, which tripled from £5m to £15.6m.
The museum’s total spending in 2021/22 was £89.5m, compared with £82.2m the previous year.
Spending on salaries dropped very slightly, from £33.8m to £33.2m, as did the average number of staff employed by the museum during the year, which fell from 889 to 887.
The end of coronavirus restrictions meant the charity claimed just £93,000 from the government furlough scheme, compared with £2.6m the year before.
The support grant from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport was £41.6m, the same as in 2020/21.
The charity’s free reserves were £5m at the end of the year, up from £4m in 2020/21. This is above the target level set by the trustees.
The annual accounts say: “While we have still not seen full recovery in our international visitors back to pre-pandemic levels, in 2021 the Natural History Museum was the most-visited museum or gallery in the UK.
“We had 2.4 million visitors to South Kensington and a further 87,321 visitors at our site in Tring.”