The project is being planned under a drive to transform access to the national collection of art treasures – which will also see a new waterfront attraction created within the next three years.

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The overhaul of the National Gallery has been announced as new research revealed the city’s flagship art attractions are now worth more than £253m to the economy.

More than two million visitors flocked to the National Gallery building in Edinburgh last year. (Image: Roberto Ricciuti)

The National Galleries of Scotland – which attracted more than 2.6m million visitors to its three main sites in Edinburgh last year – has highlight how it is delivering £11m in economic benefit for every £1 it receives from the Scottish Government.

Director-general Anne Lyden has revealed the National Galleries plans to start work within months on a long-awaited new attraction expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city’s waterfront.

The National Gallery building in Edinburgh city centre dates back to 1859. (Image: Gillian Hayes)

The Art Works project, which is expected to cost at least £100m to deliver, will become home to around 130,000 works of art when it opens in 2029.

In an exclusive interview with The Herald, Ms Lyden said she expected The Art Works – which is envisaged as the cultural centrepiece of a £1.3 billion regeneration of the Granton area – to become Scotland’s equivalent to the new V&A East Storehouse at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.

More than two million visitors flocked to the National Gallery building in Edinburgh last year. (Image: National Galleries of Scotland)

The Art Works project, work on which is expected to get underway in Granton during the summer, is at the heart of a new long-term vision for the National Galleries, which also reveals that planning has started on the next redevelopment at The Mound.

The blueprint states that the work will turn the A-listed landmark into a “refurbished and modernised building with a refreshed suite of galleries and displays that will take us through to 2050 and beyond”.

The National Galleries of Scotland plans to open The Art Works attraction in the Granton area of Edinburgh by 2029. (Image: John McAslan + Partners)

Works by some of Europe’s greatest artists, including Rembrandt, van Gogh, Poussin, Gauguin, Canaletto, Monet, Titian and Degas, are regularly on display in the exhibition galleries which are next in line to be refurbished.

The complex, which attracted more than two million visitors for the first time in its history, has already been significantly expanded since the turn of the century.

Anne Lyden is director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland. (Image: Nick Mailer)

The first phase of work, which was completed in 2004 and cost £32m, involved a refurbishment of the Royal Scottish Academy building on The Mound, which dates back to 1826, and the creation of a new underground link to connect it to the National Gallery building, as well as a lecture theatre, shop and restaurant overlooking East Princes Street Gardens.

The more recent phase, which was unveiled in 2023 and cost more than £38m, saw the creation of 12 new exhibition galleries devoted to work created by Scottish artists between 1800 and 1945, including William McTaggart, Anne Redpath, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

However new exhibition galleries are being planned for the oldest part of the 1859 building as part of a project which will also see its heating, plumbing, roofing and electrical systems brought up to date. 

The long-term refurbishment plans have been announced by the National Galleries months after it warned the Scottish Parliament that it need to keep investing in its buildings “to reduce our impact on the environment and to provide the best conditions for safeguarding and sharing our collections”.

At the time, the National Galleries said the level of risk and potential for a “catastrophic incident” at one of its buildings was “at a critical level never before seen”.

The previous phase of work at the building, which was designed by Hoskins Architects, was more than a decade in the planning and involved the conversation of several additional spaces which were added beneath the 1859 building in the 1960s and 1970s into galleries overlooking East Princes Street Gardens.

Plans for the next phase of the revamp, which is expected to cost well over £10m to deliver, will see a complete revamp of levels three and four of the National Gallery, which are usually accessed from The Mound precinct.

Ms Lyden told The Herald: “We are basically looking to update and refurbish the galleries on The Mound level of the building.

“This is really the second part of the project after we opened the new Scottish galleries in 2023.

“It is a classic case of redecorating one room in your house and the rest of the house then looking a bit tired. It’s also a bit like rewiring your house and making it suitable all of our technological needs.

“We will be bringing these galleries into line with the modern galleries we created in 2023, which will also give us the ability to update all the infrastructure behind them.

“This work is really about future-proofing these galleries, and making sure we are able to continue to do what we do for future audiences.

“Our new strategy is about taking us to 2030 and The Arts Works project is our big priority.

“However we have also been thinking about 2050 and beyond, and what decisions we need to make in the new four years to get us where we want to be by 2050.

“The concept of this project is about being a good ancestor and making decisions that future generations will look back and thanks us for.

“These gallery spaces are entirely within that sphere. It’s about making sure that they are fit and suitable to take us into the future, especially when we are dealing with a climate crisis.”

The Art Works project, which received planning permission at the end 2023, was at risk of being postponed indefinitely last summer.

However the National Galleries announced in January that it was finally able to proceed after the Scottish Government confirmed a three-year funding commitment worth £56 million for what will be the most significant new cultural building in Scotland since V&A Dundee opened in 2018.

It is hoped the UK Government will also support the Granton project, which is believed to be 60 per cent funded at the moment. It previously put £50m into the V&A East Storehouse project.

She added: “The Art Works project is going to really transform what we do.

“It will give our audiences access to our collection in a way that they have never had before.

“The opening of the V&A East Storehouse has been quite helpful for us as there is a very similar principle behind it. The Art Works will definitely be a version of that.

“It will be a free-to-visit experience where you can engage with 97 per cent of our collection which would otherwise be hidden away. Only three per cent of our collection is either on display in our galleries or out on loan.

“People will literally be able to pull out racks with paintings on it. There will be a whole suite of viewing rooms for looking through photographs and drawings.

“If you are doing a deep-dive research project, we will have our entire collection, our archives and our library in the one location for the first time.

“There will be big windows on the outside of the building which will allow people to look in and then come in for a kind of creative collision.

“Having everything on the one site will also allow us to loan work much more efficiently. People will able to see a lot more of our work around Scotland in future. The Art Works will be both a destination hub and a distribution hub.”