Royal Armouries Museum: Yorkshire historic attraction has surge of visitors since TikTok video went viral with nearly 10 million views

The Royal Armouries Museum, a free museum of arms and armour from the past to the present, is located on Armouries Drive in Leeds, a 20 minute walk from the railway station.

The museum launched its TikTok channel in September this year and published a video featuring Gen Z marketing scripts and language.

The video quickly went viral around the world and racked up almost 10 million views.

The architect behind the video and communications officer at the Royal Armouries Museum, Katie Glover, wasn’t expecting it to reach this level of popularity.

“Absolutely not, not in a million years,” she told The Yorkshire Post.

“I was hopeful obviously, any social media person hopes that they will get some good reactions.

“We’d previously had a video hit a million views, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that we could hit a million, but 10 million was never in my wildest dreams.

“It was very rewarding to see though.

“It’s proven to be a successful format, I think the combination of our museum curation staff who are so clever using this language is fun and engaging so it’s definitely something we would want to continue exploring and have continued exploring.”

Ms Glover said people had started to visit the museum after spotting the video.

“We've got a lot of feedback since the video went viral,” Ms Glover added.

“People are coming up to us and saying 'I'm here because I saw your TikTok' and that's happened quite a lot, not just from the viral video but from our TikTok presence in general and the way that our audience has grown on the platform.

“We are seeing it in person now so we do know that people are coming as a direct result of seeing our videos.”

Due to the nature of the video appealing to Gen Z, the museum has also seen a massive interest coming from younger audiences.

“We've had feedback from families that their kids are now interested in coming to the museum,” Ms Glover said.

“A lot of times you might have kids that are being dragged around by their parents but actually we now get much younger gen alpha kids that are also happy to be visiting because of TikTok. So it definitely has hit that younger generation and we have physically seen that.

“It’s incredibly important [to attract younger visitors]. History is so important and integral to society to tap into and there can be misconceptions about museums that they are boring or stuffy and I think it’s important for us to move with the times, embrace new mediums and new ways of connecting with our audience and get young people interested in history.

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“The interest is there, they may just not realise that these places are accessible to them. Using platforms like TikTok is proving that these younger people are interested and coming through the doors now.”

TikTok has been a major goal for the museum for some time now after seeing the success of brands that use the platform, Ms Glover said.

“I joined the Armouries about six or seven months ago and it was set as my first big task when I joined the [museum], so I launched the account and I ran it as well,” she said.

“We could see how big of a success other brands were getting on TikTok. It’s tapping into moving with the times and keeping up on social media.

“You can see social trends are moving away from platforms like Facebook and TikTok becoming number one, so it was just important that we were seen in that space.

“As for the video itself, it was an early video that we posted and for me it was about establishing an audience, establishing ourselves as current and that we can tap into these trends.

“We’re not just going to be creating what might be conceived as boring content, we’re going to be creating a wide range of content including fun and silly stuff but also informative. It was about diversifying the audience and that’s really what it was able to do.”

There are some misconceptions about the museum that Ms Glover is looking to dispel.

“I would just want the public to know that it’s an exciting museum, it’s a museum that is so full of incredible stories and it’s not just your old, dusty things in cases,” she said.

“It’s a really vivid lively museum, we have live interpretation performances every day we’re open with actors in costume fighting in the armouries.

“You can watch them do combats, you can hold the weapons, ask them questions, we also have modern weapons, we have weapons from film and TV.

“It’s such a diverse collection and it’s such a lively space and I would just want people to be aware of that because it’s hard to get that across sometimes.”

There’s a lot of events coming up at the Royal Armouries Museum in 2025.

“We always do our joustings, we've got two more jousting tournaments next year,” Ms Glover said.

“We’ve also got an amazing new temporary exhibition which will be opening in the summer called Gladiators at the Coliseum, this will be coming all the way from Italy, featuring weapons from Pompeii and things that have Gladiators used in the Coliseum.

“We also have our superheroes event in February half term which was really successful last year. The Gladiators event is brand new and the first time the exhibition has been seen in the UK altogether.”