World Class Museums - why are they free to everyone?

I'm talking about the British museum, I doubt many overseas visitors visit the Fen Drainage Museum but I'm happy that we all pay the admission price regardless of our nationality to visit small local places.

I spent some of this afternoon examining the last set of report and accounts for our city museums and galleries (yes I lead a very sad life😂), and despite visitor numbers being healthy across the normal visitor traffic, and various special exhibitions bringing in extra footfall where donations were suggested, they barely broke even. I suspect this might be the case with a lot of provincial museums. You have to have something with some clout, like the Royal Armouries in Leeds or the Imperial War Museum in Manchester which are free to visit, but because they are definitive and impressive collections, will attract far more visitor who will be more inclined to donate.

The Royal Armouries started off as an overspill of exhibits from the London collection and there were a lot of dissenting voices against allowing it to happen at all. They said it wouldn’t take off outside London, but they were proved very wrong indeed. It became accessible to a lot of people for whom visiting London was just a bridge too far and has expanded to become a world class tourist attraction in its own right. That, and the Imperial War Museum gave the lie to the premise that if you move something out of London it is destined to fail.