THE executive who has decided that York Art Gallery will charge visitors when it reopens in August told this newspaper: “We’ll be interested to see the reaction.” Well, here goes.

The reaction from me is one of shock and annoyance, irritation and disbelief that it could cost £7.50 to enter the refurbished gallery. Not that the blame necessarily lies with Janet Barnes, the retiring chief executive of York Museums Trust. Perhaps she has no choice. But an art gallery that charges admission is a poor sort of gallery. Surely the art in a city’s gallery belongs in effect to the people; some of the paintings may well in fact have been donated to a gallery on that basis.

So if this is the people’s art, then the people should be able to get in to see it for free.

By all means charge them a fortune to buy a cappuccino and a cake; by all means sell them costly books and prints in the gift shop, alongside all the other tasteful tat such places stock; by all means ask for notes to be dropped into a box by the door; and by all means charge for one-off exhibitions. But please don’t charge for entry.

This point was made well in Tuesday’s paper by letter writer Leonard Robinson, who recalled his pre-war education and the part played by free entry to museums and galleries. It was a good letter and one worth seeking out online if you missed it.

I make no similar claims for my education, but I do love an art gallery. It wasn’t always so. There was a time when I had to hide the yawns while looking at art. I might even yawn occasionally still, but only when trying to see too much. You can only swallow so many paintings at one go. You have to pace yourself. After a while the eyes itch and the brain glazes over.

That is one reason why an entry charge is a bad idea. You can use an art gallery in many ways. Take your time if you have the patience; linger dutifully over every painting if you wish. But if you don’t have the stamina, just pick one painting, stand in front of it and look. Dash in for 15 minutes while you are waiting for a bus, find a painting and soak it up. Then next time you are waiting for a bus, pick a different painting and absorb that one instead. You can’t do that at £7.50 a throw.

My own default setting when in a city unknown to me is to head for the art gallery and introduce myself to whatever might be on show.

As for York Art Gallery, those of us who love the place have been waiting for such a long time to see it open again. And now, as the big unveiling gets closer, we learn that it will cost us to go in. Visitors from outside of York will certainly have to pay, while a decision has yet to be made on residents with YorkCards. I think residents should be able to go in for free, but then I think everyone should be able to go in for free.

Money is obviously a problem, and the York Museums Trust has seen its funding slashed, and has to find the readies somewhere. But I always feel, politics aside, that a country can afford to fund all sorts of things if it wishes. And free art galleries, and museums come to that, ought to be at the top of the list of hugely beneficial non-essentials.

• I SEE that Katie Hopkins, the brilliant self-publicist and everyone’s favourite horrible person, has been criticised by a UN human rights chief for a column in The Sun in which she described migrants who risked losing their lives by crossing the Mediterranean as “cockroaches”.

Of course some columnists always have cranked things up for effect, but her ignorant remarks should see her ejected from the Honourable Convocation of Columnists and Word-Builders. Well, it’s my entirely invented convocation and I have just voted unanimously to have Katie kicked out.