British Museum tops visitor league table for eighth year running

Nine of Britain's top10 leading visitor attractions in 2014 were in London with the British Museum topping the list for the eighth year in a row, figures revealed on Monday.

The list, compiled by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, showed the British Museum attracted 6,695,213 visits during the year. This was just a few hundred thousand ahead of second-placed National Gallery with 6,416,724 visits.

London's South Bank Center, with 6,255,799 visitors, was in third place. The one provincial attraction in the top 10 was the Library of Birmingham, only opened in 2013, in tenth place with 2,414,860 visitors.

Xinhua recently reported that the showpiece library in Birmingham is making half of its staff redundant and cutting opening hours to save money.

The other six London attractions in the top ten were: the Tate Modern (5,785,427), the Natural History Museum (5,388,295), the Science Museum (3,356,072), the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) (3,180,450), the Tower of London (3,075,950) and the Somerset House (2,463,201).

The increase at the Tate was helped by a blockbuster event during 2014, the Matisse exhibition.

In the top 20 just two non-London attractions make an appearance, the Chester Zoo and Edinburgh Castle.

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions said the number of visits to leading attractions in Britain during 2014 was 6.5 percent higher than the previous year. In Scotland the increase was even higher, at a fraction below 10 percent, boosted by the Commonwealth Games being held there.

Bernard Donoghue, the association's director expressed confidence that figures for 2015 would show another rise with an anticipated increase in overseas visitors heading to Britain.

He added: "These figures clearly demonstrate the popularity of our best loved attractions and the importance of tourism to the UK - it's the 5th biggest industry in the UK and the 3rd largest employer, generating 127 billion pounds (189 billion U.S. dollars) per year."

ALVA members operate Britain's most popular, iconic and important museums, galleries, palaces, castles, cathedrals, zoos, historic houses, heritage sites, gardens and leisure attractions.

The 2,200 tourist sites across the UK host over 119 million domestic and overseas visitors each year, attracting around 28 percent of all visits made annually in Britain. Endit