Renfewshire Council has started work to build a new £2.7 million museum store on Paisley's high street.

The facility will house tens of thousands of items from the museum collection not on display in the main museum and is being developed as part of Paisley's bid to be UK City of Culture in 2021.

The store will occupy the basement of the unit at 7 High Street, currently being fitted out, and will be accessible to the public via a shopfront entrance. Completion is scheduled for the end of this year.

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The project is intended to coincide with a £49m revamp of the main Paisley Museum by 2022.

Cllr Jim Harte said: "Other places in Scotland have publicly-accessible museum stores, but this is the first time such a facility has been built on a High Street, and will bring a previously-empty unit back into use.

"High streets everywhere - including Paisley's - have suffered in recent years from changes in the way people shop.

"But we can't turn the clock back - we need to be creative in finding new ways to repopulate units, and bring in new footfall which existing traders can benefit from.

"The museum store is part of a wider effort to use cultural attractions to do that, along with the UK City of Culture 2021 bid, the plans to revamp the main museum - which we expect to bring 125,000 visitors a year to the town centre - and the relocation of Paisley Central Library to a vacant unit on the high street."

(LM/CD)