HOUSED in a what used to be a doctor's home, a town's art treasures are to receive some intensive therapy.

Gallery staff in Middlesbrough are to spend months conserving and restoring scores of objet d'art.

The important but rarely seen collections are to be made ready for display in an £11m art gallery, which is due to be built in the town centre and opened in 2005.

The town's existing gallery has been in a former doctor's house in Linthorpe Road since 1958, the size of the rooms limiting the scale and scope of the exhibitions able to be presented.

Godfrey Worsdale, the council's director of museums and galleries, said: "The location of the art gallery was always intended to be a temporary home."

The gallery and the Cleveland Crafts Centre will close at the end of this month to allow the back room checks and restoration work to begin.

Mr Worsdale said: "It is sad that the current venues will close, but they will make way for a vastly improved facility, which will enable gallery staff to bring exhibitions of the very highest quality to the region."

Between the gallery and crafts centre closing and the new complex opening in two years, there will be a programme of exhibitions and workshops with artists, organised in shopping centres, community halls and libraries.