The Ashmolean, Britain’s oldest museum reopens tomorrow as one of the most up-do-date in the world after a £61m remake. Simon Tait reports

It began as a cabinet of curiosities, a strange collection of botanical and ethnographical objects gathered together by two eminent gardeners, John Tradescant father and son, and put on public display in their house in Lambeth.

Now, after years of tinkering and juggling with inadequate funding, it is reopening as a spacious repository of art and antiquities with a new mission o connecting cultures and civilisations for the better understanding of them by both students and the international public. The oldest public museum in the oldest university in the English speaking world has had a 21st century remake designed by the architect Rick Mather and costing £61m, to create an international facility for both students and public.

The Ashmolean first opened in Broad Street in 1683, the Tradescant collection having been passed on by the family to the scholar Elias Ashmole adding to his own, and eventually outgrew the building and moved in the 1840s to Beaumont Street to a neo-classical building designed by Charles Cockerell.

Only the galleries and facilities at the front of the old museum remain. The extensions behind the Cockerell building, completed in the 1890s, have been replaced by the new Mather designed open spaces, with natural light serving each of five levels from an atrium, and bridges linking them.

“It is” said Professor Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s new vice-chancellor, “a powerful statement of the way in which Oxford’s dynamic future is being fuelled by the richness of its past. Today, as a result of the effort, commitment and generosity of so many – and as part of the Campaign for Oxford – the special role of the Ashmolean has been secured for generations to come”.

The museum is a teaching and research department of the university as well as being a public museum, for which admission is free.

The Ashmolean has been completely recast to a strategy of “Crossing Cultures Crossing Time”, said Christopher Brown, the museum’s director. “From the outset, our ambition has been to create not just an improved and expanded version of Britain’s oldest public museum, but something significantly different in kind: a new way of showcasing the Ashmolean’s remarkable collection, for the benefit of the widest possible audience”.