The conversion of the upper storey of Swindon Borough Council’s Civic Offices in Euclid Street into an art gallery and museum has run nearly £100,000 over budget.

The authority’s cabinet member for finance Councillor Kevis Small told his cabinet colleagues that the costs for getting the upstairs of the 1930s listed building ready to host the borough’s museum and art gallery are now expected to be £493,000. That’s against a budget of £400,000 – and represents a 23 per cent overrun.

Cllr Small said: “The £400,000 budget for the project was set before we know that the museum and gallery would be hosted here at this building and that it would be for renovations at Apsley House.

Cllr Small’s report added: “The overspend is due to separate smaller packages of work, the costs of which were not foreseen at the outset, including additional decoration, lighting and power requirements, meeting conditions related to the building’s listed status and stoppages related to the registry office, alongside a general above-expected rise in prices.”

The money to cover the overspend will mainly come from a £60,000 underspend on the purchase and installation of a new audio-visual systems at Steam Museum, and the remaining £33,000 will be found from the daily revenue budget allocated to museums for the coming year.

The cabinet member for heritage, arts and culture, Councillor Marina Strinkovsky, is overseeing the  creation of the new space for the artefacts and artworks in the Swindon collection.

She said: “Much as I love this building and much as I am pleased that the museum and art gallery is going to be here, there have been issues.

“This is a council office building, so it hasn’t had much maintenance for the last 20 years at all, and we kept finding problems- but I have to say that the contractors have been excellent.”

One benefit to the new use for the building, Cllr Strinkovsky added, was that its security will be much improved: “There will be millions of pounds worth of art here, so we will have much better CCTV and new alarms which will make the building and everyone using it more secure.”

The museum and gallery spaces are still scheduled to be opened this spring, although no more specific a date has been provided by the council.

The borough has been without its museum and gallery since March 2020 when it shut in Apsley House as part of the first Covid-19 lockdown.