Wiltshire Heritage Museum has been awarded a grant of £150,000 towards a new Bronze Age gallery which will house material excavated from Stonehenge.

The Devizes museum needs to raise £500,000 and plans to have the new gallery open by 2012 to link in with the new Stonehenge visitor centre.

The museum has Britain’s best Bronze Age collections but the gallery is cramped.

A new gallery will feature items from the Bronze Age burial site at Bush Barrow near Stonehenge and the gold finds will be on permanent display for the first time in generations.

Museum director David Dawson said the grant was “fantastic news.”

“We plan to double the space for the Bronze Age gallery and we will move it downstairs. We have a lot of objects in cases on display but there is not space to explain the story about the people they were buried with.

“The grant will enable us to apply to the likes of the Heritage Lottery Fund for further funding.”

The money was awarded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Wolfson Foundation as part of £4 million worth of grants made nationally.

Culture Minister Barbara Follett said: “These grants help provide the extras that normal funding sometimes cannot reach, going towards good quality museum projects that will enhance displays and interpretation as well as showing good value for money.”