Explore 1,000,000 Digitized Artworks from Across the UK: Paintings, Sculptures, Street Art & More
No art enthusiast’s visit to the United Kingdom would be complete without days at the British Museum, the Tate, the V&A and the National Gallery. The fact that all those respected institutions are in London constitutes a plausible excuse never to stray outside the capital. But that capital is surrounded, lest we forget, by not just a whole country, but a whole United Kingdom’s worth of countries. Each region of England has its own museums and galleries worth visiting, and so do Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But why just visit museums and galleries? Universities, libraries, town halls, hospitals, homes: these places and more also put art on display for anyone who cares to visit them, which you can now do not just physically, but also online at Art UK.
A free-to-all portal that “connects everyone with the UK’s public art collections,” Art UK has taken it as its mission to “digitally unite one million artworks from 3,500 institutions.” Some of the most popular of the roughly 70,000 artists whose work it makes available to view online include Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Paul Gauguin, Constantin Brâncuși, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama.
As even that short list reflects, what’s on digital display at Art UK is by no means limited to British works, nor are there any restrictions on medium or sensibility. Paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, digital art: if it’s held at a UK institution, it’s available for your viewing pleasure — or your education, your research, whatever your purpose may be.
A decade into Art UK’s evolution, one of the most fascinating sections of its digital holdings may hardly contain any work by artists whose names you’ve heard. That’s because it’s a collection of the UK’s murals and street art, whose digitization began in early 2024. “The project followed the successful, award-winning sculpture digitization and engagement project, which firmly established Art UK as the home for showcasing the UK’s public realm artworks,” writes photographer Tracy Jenkins. “We have now recorded over 6,600 murals, bringing the total number of public artworks on the website to 21,400.” Dating from 1000 AD to the present, these “include wall paintings in historic churches, post-war ceramic and concrete works, and contemporary painted murals and mosaics.” Collectively, they remind us that, in our haste to tour the most august temples of art, we ignore at our peril the museums without walls — or rather, the museums that are walls. Enter Art UK here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.