A picture speaks a thousand words, and finally, it’s quiet enough to hear them

Some 129 days ago, the Tate, National Gallery, V&A and Design Museum put out desolate press releases. Their lights would be off, artworks covered, and doors closed for the inevitable future, protecting their customers from a virus no one yet understood.

This month, The National Gallery was the first to re-open its doors. Within two weeks it had extended its opening hours to accommodate unexpected demand and new social distancing rules. The winding queue for the gallery, spilling out onto Trafalgar Square, a beacon of hope for the cultural wasteland many warned Britain could become.

The UK’s major museums and galleries are estimated to bring in £1.5 billion a year for the economy. Any street-smart Londoner knows that you’ll spend more time staring into the back of a tourist’s head than at any art itself if you visit a gallery or museum on the weekend. With the Tate opening all its UK galleries on Monday, things are beginning to approach a semblance of normality. But without the bustle of tourists and with new health and safety precautions, the gallery experience is a little different to how you may remember it.

One of my favourite aspects of London is its ability to fill any measure of time. Whether it is an hour before a train (a whisk around a gallery) or 15 minutes waiting for a friend (a perusal of the Tate shop), the abundance of museums and galleries means there’s never a shortage of things to do. Sadly, to some extent social distancing kills spontaneity. To ensure reduced capacity everywhere is now ticketed. But there are certain benefits to the new rules and regulations that just about make up for it.

In the National Gallery staff are PPE’d up to the nines and there are almost as many anti-bac pumps as there are windows. Staff PPE visors strangely complement the otherworldly tranquillity of the art gallery. Travelling from room to room, through decades of tragedy and travesty, it is amusing to imagine a room of 21st-century art many hundreds of years from now. Walls adorned with paintings of glittering eyes behind blue plastic masks and bored schoolchildren staring square-eyed at home-schooling screens.

It is so quiet in the gallery you could hear a pin drop. Artists sit completely alone sketching the work of artists before them. People keep their distance so there’s no crowding around descriptions or flashes of iPhone cameras right by your head. Most of the time there are no more than ten people in each large room. A gallery is perhaps one of the only places it is satisfying to feel isolated in; left to your imagination you are free from the opinions of others superimposing on your own experience of the art.

A one-way system guides you through The National Gallery’s collections. The loss of autonomy might be frustrating to some, but it reduces distracting commotion. For the amateur art historian, it also limits the risk of getting lost in the maze of rooms, trusting the curated order the experts have decided.

Once the seats in the middle of each room housed boyfriends swamped by shopping bags, dragged to the gallery on the way back from a trip to Oxford street. Or, mindlessly bored children trying their best to reimagine the seating area as a playground. Now, there’s a stronger sense that everyone is there with a common goal; brave the scary outside world to enjoy the art. Barely anyone is sat, barely anyone is on their phone. As a health and safety risk, audio guides are also gone. There’s none of the irritating sensory deprivation that makes people blunder straight into you, shouting over the guide to their equally headphone-clad friends.

For all the despair about our present and our future over the last few months, lockdown’s small gift to many was a slower pace of life. A forceful separation from the usual tourist hotspot model of as many visitors and revenue as possible, social distancing forces venues to focus on safety and customer experience. Walking through The National Gallery the reality of doing something that in the depths of lockdown had seemed a million years away, was entirely overwhelming. The pandemic has bred an appreciation of the things I took for granted before, and the next few weeks and months of adjustment as lockdowns ease are the perfect opportunity to soak up the culture, with a respite from the crowds.