First-time visitors to London for the Frieze fairs, running Oct. 16 to 19, are unlikely to be disappointed by the art and museum scene. The last six months alone have seen the opening of V&A East Storehouse (the Victoria and Albert Museum’s sleek storage facility and museum), and the grand reopening of the 200-year-old National Gallery. To top it all off, both of their collections can be seen for free.
And there’s plenty to see.
V&A East (located in Olympic Park in east London) just opened the David Bowie Center, a display of some 200 items from the rock star’s archive — including his first instrument (a saxophone given to him as a gift), his 1992 wedding suit (designed by Thierry Mugler) and his sticky-note scribblings on a planned musical set in 18th-century London.
Across town, in Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery recently unveiled a classy rehang of more than 1,000 paintings, including masterpieces by da Vinci, Rembrandt, Titian, Velázquez and van Gogh.
Yet looking beyond these long-planned projects, the reality is less rosy. The United Kingdom’s share of the global art market has shrunk by about 10 percentage points since 2006 — to 18 percent, according to the Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2025. In the past couple of years, several art galleries (the Marlborough Gallery, Addis Fine Art, TJ Boulting) and even a museum (the Jewish Museum London) have permanently closed.
While London is still Europe’s art-market nerve center, there is less cash pumping through and less of an all-around buzz. Even the Tate — the high-profile museum network that opened the boundary-pushing Tate Modern in a converted power station 25 years ago, then raised 260 million pounds (about $350 million in today’s dollars) to open a new wing in 2016 — had to cut 7 percent of its work force this year after noting in its annual report that it was running “another deficit budget” and digging into its reserves because of “profound challenges for Tate and the cultural sector as a whole.”
Admittedly, most of these challenges are global. The pandemic shuttered museums and galleries all over the world, dealing a brutal blow to the bottom line. Then, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices soaring.
Yet other causes of London’s contraction are more specifically British.
Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Brexit, curtailed E.U. nationals’ travel to Britain, and drove away many continental European collectors and patrons based in the UK, who faced new levies and bureaucratic hurdles when moving artworks in and out of the country. Countless other collectors and patrons were driven away this year by the government’s decision to scrap the so-called non-dom (short for non-domiciled) tax status, which allowed individuals whose permanent home for tax purposes was in another country to live in the U.K. without paying tax on income earned elsewhere.
“London has suffered, definitely,” said Thaddaeus Ropac, a leading international gallerist with namesake outposts in Paris, London, Seoul and Salzburg, Austria, along with a newly opened branch in Milan. He noted that the domestic British market was “getting weaker,” and that “the direct traffic” was “not there.”
The British government’s non-dom taxation decision was “almost a bigger problem for the London art world than Brexit was,” he said, because the expatriates affected by it were “a very dynamic, active part of the London scene.”
Still, Ropac said he recently renewed the lease on “our most expensive outpost,” Ely House — a stately 18th-century mansion in London’s Mayfair district, where property prices are among the highest in the city — because “London is such an important part of our activity that it is unthinkable that we would not be there.” He pointed out that the downturn was global: worldwide sales at his galleries were down 20 to 30 percent from 2022 levels, he said.
And the non-dom tax changes are not just affecting blue-chip galleries with affluent clienteles: They are also hitting nonprofits that aim to nurture young artists.
One is the Delfina Foundation (founded by the Spanish-born philanthropist Delfina Entrecanales, who died in 2022), which from its origins four decades ago (when it was known as Delfina Studios) has offered residencies to some 1,000 artists, including now-established names such as Sonia Boyce, Mark Wallinger, Thomas Demand, Urs Fischer and Wael Shawky. The foundation is raising roughly 7 million pounds (about $9.4 million) to remain in its central London headquarters, where the residencies take place; a quarter of that amount has been raised since the campaign started a year ago, according to Delfina’s director, Aaron Cezar.
Cezar added that funding challenges in London’s cultural sector started with Brexit, which delivered a “slap in the face” to E.U. collectors and philanthropists and gave them “a sense of not being wanted, not feeling welcome, not feeling valued, despite the fact that they invested so heavily in cultural institutions here.” The non-dom changes are exacerbating the situation, he said, and sparking what he described as a new “exodus” of affluent expatriates to more tax-friendly cities such as Milan and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
To be fair, the art market is weaker everywhere. According to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, global art sales in 2024 shrank 12 percent to an estimated $57.5 billion. And while galleries generated 31 percent of their sales at fairs and other live events, that was down from 42 percent in 2019, the survey said.
How are things at Frieze, which was born in London’s Regent’s Park 22 years ago and whose two British fairs — Frieze London and Frieze Masters — draw thousands of people to London in the fall?
As a group, Frieze now operates seven fairs across the globe; it was sold by the entertainment group Endeavor earlier this year after being on the market for months. The buyer was Endeavor’s own co-founder, Ari Emanuel, who purchased the company in a deal which, according to the Financial Times, reportedly valued the business at $200 million.
“A more cautious market presents real challenges,” said Eva Langret, Frieze’s director for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Yet she said the United Kingdom was “still the second-largest art market in the world,” after the United States, with a bigger share of global art sales than “the rest of Europe combined.” And most of the galleries present last year at Frieze’s twin British fairs (Frieze London and Frieze Masters) were coming back, she added.
“The market does not tell the whole story,” she said. “There is new energy in this city.”
She said Frieze London this year was hosting “a new and ambitious cohort of young gallerists” such as Ginny on Frederick, Brunette Coleman, Rose Easton and Hot Wheels, all of which were part of what she described as London’s rich “art ecosystem” — from high-quality art schools, to young artist studios, to galleries of all sizes.
Ropac agreed that no other city in Europe — not Paris, not Berlin — had a comparable art infrastructure and the “critical mass” of contemporary living artists, despite ultrahigh rents and costs. He said young artists based here told him “they would not trade London in for anything.”
Of unquestionable appeal are the city’s museums, and the fact that “you can access these extraordinary national collections for free whenever you want,” said Victoria Siddall, the director of the National Portrait Gallery who previously ran the Frieze art fairs worldwide.
Ticketed museum exhibitions increase that appeal. While funding cuts have led London to stage fewer blockbuster loan exhibitions, and to keep shows on for a lot longer than before, there are still exciting treats at any given time.
From late November through mid-April, Tate Britain will showcase what it calls “the definitive exhibition” of the works of two rival landscape painters — J.M.W. Turner and John Constable — to mark the 250th anniversaries of their respective births (Turner was born in 1775 and Constable in 1776). In February, Tate Modern will be staging the British artist Tracey Emin’s largest-ever exhibition. And in October 2026, the National Gallery is set to put on a major Renoir exhibition with important international loans.
Next door, the National Portrait Gallery plans to mark Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday with a show of portraits by prominent artists and photographers. The museum reopened in June 2023 after a three-year transformation and rehang, which was a hit with critics and the public alike.
Siddall, who took over as director last year, said her museum was seeing sustained philanthropic support. She said the Chanel Culture Fund, a philanthropic fund established by the French fashion house, had allowed the museum to boost the representation of women in its collections and add more than a dozen works by female artists when it reopened. The fund has now supported eight newly commissioned artworks that are currently on display across the museum, she said.
Hannah Barry, a contemporary art gallerist and cultural curator — who, nearly two decades ago, helped put the southeast London area of Peckham on the global art map by establishing both a gallery and the Bold Tendencies summer art festival there — said the creative dynamism in the city was constant.
“London has never really had a moment where it’s fallen asleep or become dormant,” she said. “There’s an exciting undercurrent that simmers in the city, regardless of the very clear and present challenges, obstacles, dangers that exist.”
“It has an aliveness to it” that “never really goes away,” she said. She attributed it to the city’s “scale and spread,” with activity in all parts of the city, though that activity was “not necessarily visible straight away.”
Cezar, of the Delfina Foundation, said his foundation had recently put out nearly a dozen different open calls inviting artists from Southeast Asia, East Africa and Eastern Europe to apply for residencies — and received more applications than ever.
“London has faced turbulent times before,” he said. “The power of the city as a production house has persisted despite all of this.”
Besides, he noted, “in times of trouble, the art that comes out is much stronger and greater.”
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