Work has started on converting the upper floors of Swindon Borough Council’s Civic Offices into the town’s museum and art gallery.

And even on a tour of the spaces as they are now, and not as they will be, members of the Friends organisation supporting the gallery are excited at both the size of the space and the possibilities it presents.

Museums manager Frances Yeo and the council’s cabinet member for heritage, arts and culture showed members from the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, and assorted journalists around the upper floor, describing how it will be laid out.

Ms Yeo said: “Work has already started on the lift for people who need it to get up to the first floor.

“And work will begin on creating the galleries and exhibitions spaces, as well as a reception and shop, a research and library room, a lunch and activity room for school parties and toilets of course.”

The work is starting three and a half years after the museum and gallery closed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, and follows the closure and offering for sale of the previous building, Apsley House, a listed Georgian building at the corner of Victoria Road and Bath Road, in Old Town.

Showing the party around, Ms Yeo said: “It looks like corridors of offices at the moment, but there is about 40 per cent more display space than we had in Aspley House, so we can show more, and the storage space is closer, so it will be much easier to cycle through exhibitions."

Two long gallery rooms will be used for the main art exhibitions, with the walls of the corridor also carrying artwork.

Ms Yeo said: “It might be work related to the main exhibition, or something adding context - but the walls won’t be blank as they are now.”

There will also be seven rooms in the museum part of the space, tracking Swindon’s history from even before human habitation and running, in order through prehistory, Celtic and Roman eras, Saxons and Normans, pre-industrial growth, then the town’s expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries to the modern-day borough.

Chairman of the Friends group, Linda Kasmaty said: “It’s really exciting. And it’s a big space.

"A town Swindon’s size needs something this ambitious. It’s great to see work starting – we’ve been waiting so long.

"It’s going to be a wonderful museum.”