British Museum Western Range Redevelopment

The Western Range reads as one building from Great Russell Street. It is ten, stacked onto Sir Robert Smirke’s Grade I listed 1820s quadrangle over 190 years, with incompatible services, poor accessibility and no modern environmental control.

That block holds the Parthenon sculptures and the Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern collections. The museum was built for 100,000 visitors a year and takes six million. Its collection has grown from roughly 150,000 objects to more than eight million. The redevelopment covers about 15,650 sq m, close to a third of total gallery area, and is the largest project in the institution’s 270-year history.

Project Scope

New collection stores and research facilities, reinstated historic doorways to bring daylight back into the sculpture galleries, full services replacement, and a rebuild of how the collection is displayed. Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture won a two-stage international competition in February 2025 from 60 entries, with five shortlisted schemes publicly exhibited in the Reading Room. Purcell is executive and conservation architect. Arup covers MEP, structural and civil engineering. Ali Cherri is attached as artist, Holmes Studio on graphics and wayfinding, Plan A on design team coordination. Delivery will be phased so the museum stays open throughout, with Western Range objects redisplayed elsewhere or loaned out.

No construction value has been published, and the figures in circulation should be treated carefully. Reporting has put the full masterplan at hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly over a billion, which is a projection for the whole masterplan rather than this building. The one firm number is a GBP 28,286,352 design-services contract running to 31 March 2036, and that end date is a professional-services term, not a completion date. BP has committed GBP 50 million over ten years toward the masterplan, a sponsorship that has drawn sustained public criticism. No main contractor has been appointed.

Why It Matters

Phased delivery inside an occupied Grade I listed museum, over ten conjoined structures with no common services strategy, is about as constrained as heritage work gets. Everything moves through a public building that cannot close, past objects that cannot be jostled, under a listing that limits what can be cut.

It is also the largest single commission in UK cultural building for a generation, and the supply chain has been watching the contractor appointment since February 2025. That decision is still outstanding.

Project Team & Details