The £12 million Courtyard Development at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the art museum of the University of Cambridge, has given the museum new life and energy.

After five years of planning, in 2001 the Heritage Lottery Fund granted £5.6 million and the Museum raised £6 million towards reclaiming a previously redundant courtyard formed by twentieth-century additions to the original nineteenth-century Museum building.

At the heart of the project is a new and inviting public space spread over four floors. The Courtyard Development, designed by John Miller + Partners, has added 3,000 sq metres of new and improved accommodation, to ensure the collections are made as accessible as possible to the Museum's 300,000+ annual visitors.

New galleries for temporary exhibitions, medieval and renaissance and 20th and 21st century art have been developed. Improved visitor facilities include a new entrance, a lift to all floors, and a larger café and shop in the Courtyard. A major Impressionist exhibition, with works by Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Gauguin, Seurat and Cézanne, launched the redevelopment last summer.

Improved education facilities including a seminar room, schoolsroom and studio have enabled the Museum to extend the range of activities on offer which include life drawing classes and object-based courses. The Museum offers a full range of programmes for schools and adult learners and works with groups with special needs, such as Basic Skills, sufferers of Alzheimer's disease and their carers, and homeless people.

New IT resources were also launched. Pharos - a rich web resource - offers a multi-layered approach to the Museum's collections. An innovative eGuide - on handheld computers donated by Toshiba - provides audio-visual information about the objects in the collections to visitors as they move around the galleries.

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