A building can be free to enter and still feel as though it was not made for you.
There is no admission charge for the National Gallery’s permanent collection. That does not remove every other threshold. A person may live hundreds of miles from Trafalgar Square. They may be unable to travel, uncertain about access or convinced that they lack the knowledge required to belong among the paintings. They may have passed the building without imagining that anything inside was theirs.
These are not the people who should be excluded from a conversation about the Gallery’s future. They are among the people it most needs to hear.
The National Gallery has convened a citizens’ assembly to consider how it can bring people and paintings together. NG Citizens involved roughly 50 people aged 16 and over from across the four nations of the UK. They were chosen through a civic lottery after invitations went to 15,000 households. The Gallery’s 2025–26 annual report records that 55 people were recruited and that 36 of them had never visited it.
That fact has helped make the project a target. A report in The Times placed its £250,000 cost in the headline and described criticism from an art-conservation group that called the scheme “barking mad”. The underlying objection is larger than the bill: why should people without artistic expertise influence the direction of one of the world’s great galleries?
The question sounds reasonable until we examine what the participants have actually been asked to do.
They have not been recruited to attribute disputed paintings, plan conservation treatments or replace curators. Across five sessions, members considered unequal access to galleries, the public value of art, audience data and the changes presented by artificial intelligence and other technologies. They heard from specialists before developing a vision and eight guiding principles. A smaller panel is expected to continue working with Gallery staff until the 2029–30 financial year. The full report is due this autumn.
This is not a contest between knowledge and ignorance. It is an attempt to bring different forms of knowledge into the same room.
What expertise cannot reveal on its own
The National Gallery needs curators, conservators, researchers and educators. Its collection of more than 2,600 paintings cannot be cared for by enthusiasm alone. Expertise protects fragile objects, establishes their histories and helps viewers see details that would otherwise remain invisible.
Public participation does not weaken that work unless an institution uses it as an excuse to disregard professional judgement. Nothing published about NG Citizens suggests that its members will decide which varnish should be removed from a painting or which attribution belongs on a label.
What a specialist cannot know from professional training alone is how the Gallery appears to somebody who has never crossed its threshold.
A curator can explain why a painting matters. A non-visitor can explain why that explanation never reached them. A designer can produce an accessible entrance. A disabled visitor can describe the chain of information, transport, fatigue and uncertainty that determines whether they ever arrive at it. An education team can create a programme for families. A parent can say whether the programme feels possible around cost, work and the practical disorder of taking children into central London.
These observations are not substitutes for cultural knowledge. They are evidence about whether a cultural institution is fulfilling its purpose.
The assembly was not left without informed input. Its members heard from subject specialists, and the project’s external advisory group includes curators, academics, artists, cultural leaders and the chief executive of the disability-access charity VocalEyes. The process is deliberative: participants learn, question and form recommendations rather than being asked to provide an instant opinion on paintings they have never studied.
We accept this distinction elsewhere. A patient does not need a medical degree to identify where a health service becomes impossible to navigate. A passenger does not need to be an engineer to describe a railway that excludes them. Lived experience does not confer every kind of authority, but neither does professional expertise contain every answer.
National is more than a location
The National Gallery was founded by Parliament and holds its collection for the public. In the year ending March 2026, it received £33.4 million in grant-in-aid from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its permanent collection remains free to enter.
That creates an obligation broader than attracting the largest possible crowd.
The Gallery recorded roughly 4.4 million visits in 2025–26, of which 2.57 million—58 per cent—were made by international visitors. Their presence is part of the institution’s value and should not be treated as a problem. The figures do, however, complicate the assumption that a busy building is necessarily reaching the nation whose collection it holds.
A national gallery situated in London must work harder to make “national” mean something beyond the address of the people who can reach it. Digital access, loans, partnerships and education programmes all contribute. So can listening to people from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and regions of England whose relationship with the Gallery may not include a visit to Trafalgar Square.
Belonging cannot be measured only by whether admission is free. It includes whether people recognise that entry is intended for them, whether they can encounter the collection elsewhere and whether the stories told around it make room for curiosity without demanding prior confidence.
The loss when somebody remains outside is not merely a missed attendance target. It may be the painting that would have disturbed them, delighted them or given recognisable form to something they had never been able to articulate.
Someone who has never visited may know very little about the Gallery’s daily operation. They may know a great deal about the distance between a public institution’s promise and its reach.
Listening must produce evidence
Defending the principle of the assembly does not place the project beyond criticism.
£250,000 is a substantial sum, particularly while cultural organisations are under financial pressure. Fifty people cannot embody every community in the UK, and a civic lottery cannot remove all forms of self-selection: the final group still consists of people willing and able to participate. The language of collaboration can also become flattering cover for decisions an institution has already made.
The Gallery will therefore need to show what happened after the workshops. Publishing the assembly’s report is only the first step. It should identify which recommendations it accepts, which it rejects and why. It should explain how the continuing panel influences decisions, disclose the resources used and report results that can be examined rather than merely celebrated.
Success should not be claimed because participants enjoyed the process or because the Gallery can say that it listened. The useful questions are more demanding. Did information become easier to find? Did programmes change? Did partnerships reach people outside London? Were barriers identified by disabled people removed? Did those who felt that galleries were not for them gain meaningful ways to encounter the collection?
If the answers remain unclear, criticism of the project’s cost will be justified. Participation becomes valuable when it changes an institution’s understanding and conduct, not when it supplies photographs for an annual report.
That standard should be applied after the recommendations are visible. Condemning the assembly before its full findings have been published reveals a different anxiety: that people without recognised cultural authority have been invited to speak at all.
Beyond the frame
A gallery cannot make every decision by referendum. It should not mistake popularity for quality or remove difficult work because it unsettles an audience. Its responsibility includes preserving art whose importance may not be immediately obvious and allowing scholarship to challenge what visitors think they know.
NG Citizens addresses an earlier question: who gets close enough to be challenged? Members without a history of visiting can identify the invitation that never reached them, the journey that felt impossible or the quiet belief that art belonged to somebody more educated, wealthier or more certain.
If their accounts lead to visible changes, the project will have achieved more than consultation. It will have extended the collection’s public life.
The paintings are held for scholars, regular visitors and people who have not yet discovered a reason to enter. A national gallery should be judged partly by whether their absence is treated as inevitable—or as a distance it has a duty to cross.