Kew Palace, home of George III and family in the early 1800s. © Historic Royal Palaces / newsteam.co.uk

The shortlist for the £100,000 2007 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries has been announced.

It features Britain’s smallest royal palace, two transformed Victorian museums and the first UK gallery to cut its carbon emissions by almost 50 per cent.

They are: Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum for its New Century Project, Kew Palace in London, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex and Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum.

The four venues were chosen by a panel of expert judges from a longlist of ten and the eventual winner will be announced on May 24 during Museums and Galleries Month.

The What On Earth Galleries at Weston Park showcase the city's famous natural history collection. © Sheffield Museums Trust

“Choosing a shortlist has been tough,” said novelist, broadcaster and journalist Francine Stock, who is chairing the judging panel. “We’ve travelled coast to coast from northernmost Scotland to the Sussex seaside visiting ten very different museums.”

“Each has its own way of attracting the local community and new audiences to collections and exhibitions and it’s exciting to see their growth in visitor numbers. There are marked contrasts in size and style but all four shortlisted museums are outstanding.”

Kelvingrove’s £35m New Century Project was a three-year restoration and redisplay scheme, which allowed more of its world-class collection to be shown to the public and targeted a wide range of audiences, cutting across disciplines and communicating through themes and stories.

Chichester's Pallant House Gallery now has a state of the art gallery extension. © Pallant House Gallery

Pallant House contains one of the world’s best collections of Modern British art and its new £8.6m extension means that 17 galleries now show both the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions to their best advantage. It is also the first gallery in the UK to install a geothermal heating and cooling system, cutting its carbon emissions by between 40-50 per cent.

Kew Palace, run by Historic Royal Palaces, is Britain’s smallest royal palace and recreates the era of George III who lived there in the early 1800s. Careful conservation and interpretation plus imaginative visual and sound effects have been used to recreate its Georgian heyday.

Sheffield’s Weson Park Museum underwent a £19m transformation, involving the local community, bringing to life the unusual treasures from the city’s archaeology, natural, social history and visual and decorative art collections. It attracted 55,000 visitors on its reopening day.

Spitfire LA198, hanging from the roof of Kelvingrove's west court. © Glasgow City Council (Museums)

The Gulbenkian was launched in 2003 and is the UK’s biggest single arts prize, given annually to one museum or gallery for excellence and innovation, regardless of its size and budget.

Past winners have included Big Pit: National Mining Museum of Wales in Blaenafon in 2005 and Brunel’s ss Great Britain in Bristol, which won in 2006. Ss Great Britain’s visitor figures have risen by 40 per cent since the award and has since been shortlisted for the European Museum of the Year prize.

The 24 Hour Museum is running a People’s Vote, where you can have your say on who should win the coveted prize. You can still vote for any of the longlisted venues until the eve of the announcement of the prize proper, so even if your local museum hasn’t made the shortlist you can still make your voice heard.