Having spent years travelling around the UK, I've realised just how important free art galleries are to our communities

Tate recently announced a free-to-join membership scheme for 16- to 25-year-olds, which will enable young people to visit ticketed blockbuster shows for a fiver rather than the usual £20-plus.

“Tate Collective”, as the initiative is called, is open to anyone from anywhere in the world and any member can take in up to three mates for just a fiver each – plus membership automatically means discounts in the cafes and shops. What’s not to like?

Of course, you don’t need to pay to enter three of Tate’s four galleries, either in London or Liverpool (St Ives is only free to members); the ticket prices are reserved for the special big-name exhibitions, but for young art lovers and backpackers on a budget, it’s a brilliant idea.

To be honest, for anyone who isn’t eligible for this scheme, most art galleries are a bargain in this country.

Many of London’s most famous spaces, including those that are slightly off the beaten track, like Damien Hirst’s private collection at Newport Street in Vauxhall, and the White Cube in Bermondsey, are completely free to mooch around.

And it’s not just London that has culture coming out of its ears. While schlepping around the country on tour, I’ve been popping into any gallery I can get to before tea and mic check time.

Paintings take me out of myself; they move me forwards and back; they remind me of places and people and other times.

At the Manchester Art Gallery (free, with contributions encouraged), I snooped around the pre-Raphaelites and was immediately transported back to the first time I saw any of these paintings in the flesh, aged 17 and on an A Level art trip with our teacher Mr Grundy, who wore corduroy trousers and let us smoke in the minivan.

That wasn’t my first trip to an art gallery – I have a vague memory of being with my parents and older sister when I was about eight years old and my sister, who was standing in front of a horrifically brutal painting, asked my dad what “the rape of the Sabine women” meant.

On this second, less awkward trip, I bought a postcard of Millais’s Autumn Leaves. AKA “four girls round a bonfire”, which ended up Blu-Tacked to my bedsit wall a couple of years later when I pitched up at drama school just down the road in Didsbury.

All teenage girls went through a pre-Raphaelite phase at that time and they probably still do. It’s the hair – we all wanted waist-length, rippling hair, and we all imagined ourselves floating like Ophelia down the river with everyone we’d ever known standing on the banks crying and regretting how mean they’d been to us.

I’ve grown out of my pre-Raphaelite phase but even at the age of 58, seeing John Waterhouse’s Hylas and The Nymphs (the one with the sexy sirens in the pond) was like seeing a bunch of old mates. “Hello, you glorious girls,” I found myself muttering.

Manchester has changed so much since I was a drama student in the Seventies that it was quite reassuring to touch base with a bit of Lowry and Vallette to remind me how smoggy and flat cap it was back in the day. OK, so I don’t go as far back as the 19th century, but I promise, back in the Seventies Manchester was a choking yellow haze of fog and fag smoke.

Of course one of the main reasons for visiting an art gallery is the cafe and the shop. So far, on this tour, York (less than a fiver entry fee) wins best gallery/lunch combo, with their chicken, bacon and brie salad being an excellent accompaniment to the ceramics collection upstairs. Sadly I’d just missed the Nash exhibition, but this did halve my ticket price due to the ground floor space being dark, which seemed very reasonable to me.

Moving down the country, Lincoln, conveniently situated between gigs in Scunthorpe and Leicester, has the wonderful bite-sized Usher Gallery (free), which lies almost in the shadow of the cathedral and is ideal for a quick whistle-stop tour of lots of familiar names.

Last time I visited the Usher, I sat mesmerised in front of Cornelia Parker’s film about the manufacturing of lapel poppies for Remembrance Day. It made me cry, and I’m a hard-hearted cow who hates video art.

This time a big old Terry Frost made me think of Cornwall and the sea and how much I will need a holiday when the tour is finished. A John Piper reminded me of London and a Craigie Aitchison made me miss the old man, and everything else just made me really wish I could paint.

As I left the gallery, they were putting up easels for an afternoon drawing class and I felt a massive pang of envy. I’m reaching that time of life when, along with checking till receipts and polishing apples on my bosom, I really want to sit down now and again and not just smell the flowers – I want to paint them.