You Can Enter to Win a Night Inside London’s National Gallery
The museum is celebrating the reopening of its Sainsbury Wing, as well as a major refresh of its collection, with an overnight experience for one lucky visitor
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For the past two years, crews have been hard at work renovating the Sainsbury Wing at London’s National Gallery. Now, to celebrate the wing’s makeover, the museum is giving one lucky art aficionado the chance to spend the night among its many masterpieces.
The sleepover also coincides with the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary. To mark this milestone, curators are rearranging the museum’s permanent collection—and whoever wins the overnight stay will get a sneak peek at the redesign, called “CC Land: The Wonder of Art.”
To be entered for a chance to win, participants must be over the age of 18 and subscribed to the National Gallery’s email newsletter. The contest will remain open until April 28, when a winner will be randomly chosen.
The sleepover will take place on May 9, the night before the Sainsbury Wing reopens to the public. The evening will begin with dinner for two at Locatelli, the museum’s new on-site restaurant. Then, the winner will enjoy a private tour of “CC Land: The Wonder of Art” led by Christine Riding, the National Gallery’s director of collections and research.
The museum’s bicentenary provides the “perfect opportunity to consider a new way to tell the story of the incredible paintings in our collection,” says Gabriele Finaldi, the National Gallery’s director, to the Guardian’s Nadia Khomami.
“We feel it is fitting that through this prize draw, one of our visitors should receive a first look at the newly transformed National Gallery and Sainsbury Wing and have these wonderful pictures to themselves for one special night,” he adds.
Come nightfall, the winner will snuggle into a bed placed between the Sainsbury Wing and the rest of the museum. When the winner wakes up the next morning, they’ll enjoy breakfast and a few moments to themselves among the artwork before the Sainsbury Wing opens at 10 a.m.
This is not the first time the National Gallery has hosted visitors in the middle of the night. Earlier this year, it stayed open for 24 hours during the last weekend of its popular “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” exhibition. It did the same thing in 2012 for its “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” show.
Added to the National Gallery in 1991, the Sainsbury Wing is being redesigned by New York-based architect Annabelle Selldorf. She’s been tasked with making the wing a more welcoming entrance to the National Gallery overall, as well as bringing in more natural light. The remodel has been controversial, with the wing’s original co-designer Denise Scott Brown describing the redesigned building as a “circus clown wearing a tutu.”
The museum’s redisplay of its collection, meanwhile, is one of its most thorough refreshes in recent memory. Curators are working with a lighting designer to reimagine the galleries, while crews are also sanding and varnishing the floors, as the Art Newspaper’s Louis Jebb reported in 2024.
They’re also introducing a new color scheme as they redecorate the 65 galleries on the museum’s main floor. Each gallery will also get a new introductory panel with information about the art, as well as the design and architecture of the National Gallery itself.
When the work is complete, the National Gallery will display more than 1,000 works of art created by roughly 400 artists. That represents nearly half of the gallery’s entire collection.
“We are rethinking the collection and the way it’s presented, but also the architecture and the spaces suggesting certain ways of displaying works of art,” Riding told the Art Newspaper. “We’re also using design, upgrading galleries.”
Editors’ note, April 10, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify information about entering the competition.
