How to pull them in off the streets

Museums and art galleries too often seem remote from the public. Charles Saumarez Smith (right), Director of the National Portrait Gallery, describes bold plans to make the gallery a more integral part of the life of the city

Museums are not just places where people come to see exhibitions, to experience art and history and to broaden their horizons. They are also places in which to meet, to mingle, to enjoy the company of that universe of other people who they do not know, nor necessarily wish to know, but who none the less represent a part of the experience of participation within a broader society which lies beyond the narrow horizons and essential selfishness of life at home.

Over the last 10 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of visitors to those museums and galleries which remain free. At the British Museum, the number of visitors has increased from 4.14m in 1985 to 5.74m in 1995, a net increase of 39 per cent. At the National Gallery, the numbers have increased from 3.16m in 1985 to 4.46m in 1995, an increase of 41 per cent. The numbers visiting the Tate Gallery over the same period have risen from one million to 1.76m, a rise of 76 per cent. And at the National Portrait Gallery, we have witnessed an increase from 520,000 to 850,000, or 63 per cent. I realise that there is a certain amount of dispute over these figures, but the trend is clear.

So, equally, is the trend in institutions which charge admission. visitors to the Natural History Museum, for example, have fallen from 3.35m to 1.06m, a decrease of 68 per cent. The V&A has seen a drop from 2.07m to 1.22m, or 41 per cent, whilenumbers at the Science Museum, which calls itself the fastest growing leisure attraction in Britain, have gone down from 4.61m to 1.55m, a decrease of 66 per cent. These figures are public knowledge but have not been much discussed, for they contravene one of the orthodoxies of the Eighties, which was that entrance fees would have little or no long-term impact on visitor numbers.

Those museum directors who have witnessed an increase in numbers would like to think, I'm sure, that favourable statistics reflect a new level of public interest in Greek figure sculpture or early Renaissance painting or contemporary art. They do, possibly, reflect increases in the number of tourists. And they are certainly influenced by public interest in particular exhibitions, as was evident at the Tate Gallery for the Cezanne exhibition. But, there is also something else going on: the appetite for civic and urban experience.

Over the last decade, the whole pressure has been towards the privatisation of public experience. We think that all experiences can be obtained at the touch of a finger from home, that we can surf the Internet for cultural inspiration from a lap-top computer, that goods can be delivered by mail order, and that all forms of information and entertainment can be delivered through the television screen. The corollary of this way of thinking is that the public realm is considered unreliable and even unsafe, that streets are for mugging and public transport an experience to be avoided. This picture of the increasing privatisation of experience is a bleak one. However, I believe that museums can be sites of resistance to an anti-urban world.

The extent to which the museum is a part of the life of the city (as opposed to the idea of its being a thing apart, hidden behind grand porticos and remote from everyday life) became clear to me when I left the V&A to become director of the National Portrait Gallery in 1994. There were obvious differences between the nature of the two institutions - between a museum, the V&A, which was originally a Museum of Manufactures, set up in the early 1850s in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition in order to exhibit the material wealth of the great, international cultures of the world, and a portrait gallery established to collect and display portraits of British luminaries.

The principal difference seemed to be one of scale, between an organisation with a staff of more than 800 and one of 145. Yet the biggest difference I found was was that of location. I had not thought how different it was going to be to move from a big museum in South Kensington to a relatively small public gallery located in the geographical heart of the metropolis.

South Kensington is an area which is dominated by an essentially 19th- century view of public culture - orderly, systematic, encyclopaedic and purposeful. The museums of South Kensington are evidence of a world view which was determined to dominate local topography: it was not an accident that they were built on what was then the edge of town, a greenfield site previously used for market gardens. In the 1960s, John Betjeman christened the area "Albertopolis" with a sense of mockery, recognising the spirit of Prince Albert, earnest and Germanic, that still presided over this distinctive neighbourhood.

The National Gallery, by contrast, has a much more accidental relationship to its urban context. Ewan Christian's entry to the gallery, opened in April 1896, is almost wilfully reticent, set back from St Martin's Place with no podium and very little ceremony. The gallery was tucked into a bit of vacant land which fringed the National Gallery and was donated by the government as matching funding to a gift from one W H Alexander, a property developer. Its neighbouring institutions are not other museums, but Charing Cross station, St Martin's church, cinemas, pubs and narrow back streets. Its relationship to its surroundings is both casual and architecturally accessible.

The characteristics of the area around the National Portrait Gallery have been an influence on plans which have been developed by the architects Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones for a new extension. These are currently the subject of a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. In the Fifties and Sixties, most art institutions provided a single and quite clearly focussed service - a night at the opera, a meal out or an improving visit to a museum. Museum shops, if they existed at all, were confined to basements and contained little more than educational products. As a result of pressure to raise funds, museums in the Nineties have to accommodate the idea of social as well as educational visits: museums and galleries are expected to participate as much as possible in the public sphere.

Many of the facilities we are trying to provide in our plans are not specific to museums: a lecture theatre for films and plays as well as public talks, an inviting entrance hall where people can meet and a modern circulation system aided by escalators more commonly associated with Underground stations and department stores than museums.

Escalators - not quite the done thing up till now at the NPG - will allow visitors to glide up into a calm, clear new gallery space on the upper floors. The top floor will be a conventional gallery in which we will hang our Tudor collection. On the roof there will be a cafe, subject to approval by Westminster City Council, from which, we hope, it will be possible to survey the great architectural sights of central London, taking in Nelson's Column, St Martin's-in-the-Fields and the Houses of Parliament.

These new plans are thus a way of addressing the relationship between museum and metropolis. They recognise the fact that museums have responsibilities beyond their portals and into the public realm. They will allow us to provide a set of amenities designed to enhance the visitor's experience, but with the idea that while some visitors are scholars, others are popping in for a few spare minutes between meetings or trains. I hope that what we will be able to give shape to is a gallery that is, in every sense, a part of the civic realm.

This is an edited version of "Museums and the Metropolis", a lecture given last week in the series "The Pulse of the City" organised by the RIBA Architecture Centre and the "Independent".