Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has appointed a contractor to carry out a £24m restoration project on its Temperate House - the world’s largest remaining Victorian glasshouse.

Funding for the project was provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Defra, private donors, foundations and trusts, as well as donations from Kew’s members and visitors. The contractor ISG will carry out the work.

The building contract is part of a larger £36m restoration project.

Andrew Williams, Temperate House project director at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew said: “We are delighted that work can now commence on this vital restoration of one of the nation’s most important historic horticultural buildings, built to protect, display and enable education and research using a living collection of plants from the temperate regions.”

The Temperate House is home to over 1,200 species of plants from temperate regions across Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific.

The construction project will restore the building as well as its support systems, including ventilation, irrigation and improved facilities and accessibility for visitors and staff.

The work is due to complete in spring 2017, with a formal re-opening planned a year later in May 2018.

In March this year the charity announced that it could make up to 125 redundancies because it faced a shortfall of £5m for its 2014/15 budget.

The shortfall arose because of a combined reduction of around £3.5m from its two main grant sources, a grant-in-aid from Defra and from the Kew Foundation, which raises money from supporters.

At the same time the organisation experienced “unavoidable cost increases” of roughly £1.5m.