City's museums buck trend with record attendance figures

Officials put the increase down to focussing on putting on the events and exhibitions that people want.

The figure equates to everyone in Hull visiting one of the Council's museums or galleries twice in 2009.

The most popular was the Ferens Art Gallery, which has the biggest turnover of exhibitions, which attracted 143,070 visitors, while the Streetlife museum, came in second place with 105,098.

One of the biggest draws was the eight-week-long Lauren Child Greendrops and Moonsquirters interactive exhibition at the Ferens which attracted nearly 15,000 people. The Time Troopers children's club - a free activities club for under-16s that runs every other Saturday across city centre sites – now has 1,200 members.

In feedback, 85 per cent of visitors rated the museums and gallery as excellent or good.

Head of operations at Hull Museums Simon Green said he was delighted with the figures – 2009 represented a 14 per cent increase over the previous year – at a time when colleagues elsewhere in the country were reporting theirs were either static or showing a small increase.

He said putting on "slightly off the wall more accessible events" helped make people see the museums in a different light.

Other popular events included the Remembrance Weekend event at Streetlife Museum – where more than 2,000 visitors experienced the 1940s, meeting soldiers, sailors and wardens who re-enacted an air raid – and Big Bus Day where 4,704 enjoyed a family day with buses old and new the East Yorkshire Brass Band and free open-top bus tours of the city.

In 2008 just over 436,000 people visited Hull museums.