Treasure Trove

It is Britain's oldest public museum, but many of its treasures have remained secret - until now, writes Peter Aspden.

Oxford's Ashmolean Museum yesterday showed off the results of a £61m redevelopment which has doubled the space it can devote to displaying its world-class collection of art and antiquities.

A new building, designed by Rick Mather Architects and attached to the present neoclassical structure, will give the museum 39 galleries, including an education centre, and a rooftop restaurant overlooking the town's famous spires.

The museum, which first opened in 1683, has been unable to show more than part of its collection due to its current cramped 19th-century home.

Now some of its most valuable items will go on display for the first time: its medieval Islamic textiles, among the finest in the world, are housed in a climate- and light-controlled gallery, while the Crondall gold coins - Britain's earliest indigenous currency - are shown in their entirety.

Christopher Brown, museum director, said the new display marked a radical change in emphasis from previous versions, stressing the connections and influences between cultures instead of their differences. He also said that the objects would be presented with a different "tone of voice". "We will be careful to say, 'these are some hypotheses', rather than stating them as the truth," he said.

The museum has secured £45m of the costs of the project, thanks largely to a £15m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a £10m donation from Lord Sainsbury's Linbury Trust. The new Ashmolean "simply would not have happened" without the support of Lord Sainsbury, he said. He added that the university had agreed to underwrite £16m, although fundraising efforts would continue.

The museum, which reopens to the public on November 7, is aiming to attract at least 500,000 visitors a year, an increase of 25 per cent from before the refurbishment.

The presentation of the display reflects the museum's commitment to appeal to new audiences: the section on ancient Greece is headed by an apparently scholarly quotation - "Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of the word is Greek" - which, in fact, comes from the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding .

Mr Brown said that the past display was fine "if you had a professor of Aegean archaeology at your shoulder. But 99 per cent of our visitors did not, and they found it quite difficult to understand the importance of the collection."

Peter Aspden