The Heritage Lottery Fund is making a huge contribution to help people enjoy and get more from their museums, galleries and other important collections. We want every community to be able to benefit from our grants. We have now funded all ten of the nation`s most visited free entry museums and galleries, as well as hundreds of local and regional collections up and down the country.

Rather than giving grants to set up new museums, we normally target our funding at projects to improve existing collections of strong heritage importance.

We give grants for projects that improve the housing, cataloguing and presentation of museum and gallery collections, and help people learn more from the collections and make them more relevant and accessible to more people. Just as importantly, we make grants to help museums and galleries buy extra items or works of art, provide better storage facilities, and carry out essential conservation work to make sure that future generations can also enjoy them.

We believe that the ability to explore and understand the past must go hand in hand with conservation. Our investment in all aspects of the development of museums and galleries has helped them to open up their collections to more people from a wider range of backgrounds.

The good news is that we have already funded over 2000 projects for museums and collections with grants totalling over £1 billion.