It is great to see Tate sending objects on tour to Merseyside, but this is a drop in the ocean compared with the £150m given to London galleries by George Osborne to build new stores (Fostering curiosity: the Tate brings great art to the people of Merseyside, 22 February).
More than 150 years ago, Henry Cole, the founder of the V&A, commissioned special trains to take artefacts across the country. With a Victorian’s love of statistics, he wrote that the collection “had been visited by 359,125 persons … and the train had travelled 3,690 miles and been packed and unpacked 60 times”. When the V&A won the museum of the year award in 2016, the director used the money to reinstate Cole’s scheme.
