Extension for National Gallery scrapped

● Soaring budget forces bosses to scale back as revamp put on hold for a year

A multi-million pound overhaul of Scotland’s flagship art gallery has had to be scaled back due to soaring cost overruns and delays.

An extension of the Scottish National Gallery into Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh has been scrapped while a revamp has been put back for at least a year.

The cost of creating the extra space was looking at rising several millions of pounds more than budgeted for.

Bosses have admitted they do not yet know the final cost of creating a new home for Scotland’s art treasures, with designs going back to the drawing board.

The National Galleries of Scotland may have to seek fresh planning permission for the revamp, which has an £16.8 million price tag.

The news is a major blow to ambitions for the project, which is aimed a tackling the “institutional embarrassment” of how its Scottish collection is displayed.

Less than 20 per cent of visitors to the historic gallery ventured into the “dead end” of the complex to see masterpieces by leading Scottish artists such as Allan Ramsay, Sir Henry Raeburn, Alexander Nasmyth and Phoebe Anna Traquair.

The decision by the trustees of the National Galleries means there will no longer be a tripling of space devoted to Scotland’s most important historic art treasures.

Although a proposed fivemetre extension for the front of the gallery has been shelved, new landscaping in the gardens will go ahead to created better access to the site.

A third delay in the space of 12 months for the project, originally due to be unveiled in the summer of 2018, has been confirmed by the National Galleries, which was expected to start work earlier this year.

But it is expected to be at least another 12 months before the project finally gets under way, with completion pushed back until 2020 at the earliest.

Sir John Leighton, directorgeneral of the National Galleries, said the decision to abandon the extension had been taken after 18 months of work to explore options for protecting three railway tunnels running underneath the gallery.

He said: “The only significant change we’re introducing is to drop the extension of the gallery into the gardens.

“The advice we had from the engineers and architects we had working on the project was that it could be done. The more we developed the plans and worked with Network Rail we realised the engineering involved was going to be increasingly complex.

“Network Rail were quite rightly concerned about the railway tunnels, which cannot cope with any significant change in load.

“We devised a number of schemes to cope with that, which ended up with a scenario where we were effectively creating a new steel bridge underneath the extension to protect these tunnels.

“The extension was an element of the project introduced as a nice-to-have. Taking it out reduces the cost, but also significantly reduces the level of risk.

“We’re working to the £16.8m figure as a baseline. It may end up being a bit more as we will have a longer programme.”