Scotland on Sunday

My earliest childhood memory of a museum is of lying sprawled in a dark corridor with my sister on a Saturday morning, drawing a stuffed brown bear in London's Natural History Museum. We inspected the bear for fraying seams, imagined it alive and scared ourselves silly running back down the corridors, laughing hysterically, completely lost. Children growing up in Edinburgh might well have had a similar experience at the Royal Museum of Scotland, after persecuting the fish in the foyer, of course. The Royal, like the Natural History Museum, is a labyrinth of Victorian corridors, bricked up exhibition rooms and bizarre spaces created by unkind 20th century interventions. Long balconies more fit for promenading than exhibiting contain plenty of those glass-aspic cases. But all that is to change with the £70m revamp announced last Thursday, won by Glasgow-based architects Gareth Hoskins and their project partners, American exhibition designers Ralph Appelbaum Associates. The remit, says Hoskins, was to create a "world class museum".