Standing proudly on the banks of the Thames, with its graceful Greek portico welcoming visitors, Tate Britain is one of London’s most venerable cultural destinations. It is a custodian of beloved British art, and is stuffed with Turners, Gainsboroughs, Constables, and other national treasures. But lately, it has been called everything from “the museum where art goes to sleep”  to “dull and didactic.”

A Young Black (probably freed slave Francis Barber); Joshua Reynolds; 1770; Oil paint on canvas. Courtesy Tate

The reason: a controversial ‘rehang’ in 2023. Visitors may notice marked changes in some of the displays. A painting of the wealthy Baillie family, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1784, has the following wall text: “James Baillie presents an elegant, affluent image of domestic harmony. This was underpinned by the wealth Baillie amassed through Atlantic trade and plantations in Grenada, laboured by enslaved people.” Nearby is a portrait of a Black man painted by another British icon, Joshua Reynolds. The portrait is thought to be that of Francis Barber, a slave taken to England and then freed. The caption says, “The many versions of this portrait may suggest that as a Black man, he was treated as a subject rather than an individual.” Almost every wall text in this section of Tate Britain, which deals with colonial-era art, now references slavery, colonialism, or the rights of marginalised people in the museum’s much debated attempt to tell a “more expansive story of British art in ways that resonate with us today.”

In the age of culture wars, the push for better optics at Tate Britain is part of a recent and growing trend — the decolonisation of culture. To make space for hidden narratives of slavery and colonisation, British museums and cultural centres are scrutinising the curation of their exhibits and displays. The language and content used in wall label texts and in guided exhibition tours are increasingly being updated. For instance, in my own work as a volunteer tour guide at the Old Royal Naval College, I have been encouraged to talk about how the British Navy and the royals were heavily involved in the slave trade.

The intent behind such initiatives is to reframe or recontextualise art to effectively engage a more diverse UK audience, which includes immigrants from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Guyana. Even the British Museum, often under fire for displaying heritage objects taken from colonies during British rule, staged an exhibition in October 2024 by the British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke to trace the journeys of several artefacts that had been ‘acquired’ through loot, theft, conquest, and slavery. Some museums are even removing problematic curations from their collections. The Wellcome Collection closed its Medicine Man exhibit in 2022 — which included a picture of a Black African kneeling in front of a missionary — admitting it was “racist, sexist, and ableist.”

A visitor at the The Singh Twins’ Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire exhibition. Courtesy Kew Gardens

The current decolonisation movement began with the brutal murder of George Floyd in May 2020, which sent ripples of shock across the world and reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement. Institutions across the UK rushed to acknowledge Britain’s colonial legacy, some more boldly than others. In June 2020, Richard Deverell, the then director of Kew Gardens — the largest botanical garden in the world — issued an astonishing statement about Kew’s new direction: “Like so many other organisations, parts of Kew’s history shamefully draw from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism. We were beacons of discovery and science; but also beacons of privilege and exploitation. I acknowledge that I personally benefit from enormous privilege as Kew’s current white, male director. There is no acceptable neutral position on this subject; to stay silent is to be complicit.”

Portrait of James Baillie and his family; Thomas Gainsborough; 1784. Courtesy Tate

Two recent exhibitions at the Kew Gardens, held between October 2025 and April 2026, have looked into uncovering its own murky colonial past. The Singh Twins: Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire displayed cutting yet humorous works by the British-Indian artists The Singh Twins, who interrogated the wealth accumulated by the British Empire through the cultivation of cotton, indigo, cocoa, and tea. Meanwhile, another exhibition, Flora Indica, recovered the lost histories of Indian botanical art, displaying 52 watercolours created by Indian artists between 1790 to 1850, but commissioned by the British East India Company to document India’s plant diversity, so that these very plants could later be harvested for the Empire.

But decolonisation is divisive in........

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