The British Museum plans to build an enormous exhibition centre in London that will enable it to stage the biggest shows from all over the world, it announced yesterday.

It has already had to turn down the chance to show 130 spectacular treasures – the largest collection of Tutankhamun artefacts assembled in the West, which will instead be exhibited in the O2 , formerly the Dome, in Greenwich, southeast London.

It is now drawing up ambitious plans to construct a centre at the back of its historic building. Lord Rogers of Riverside, the architect celebrated for the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s building in London, has been commissioned to take control of a project that may cost £70 million.

The museum realised that it needed more space after last year’s exhibition of Michelangelo drawings drew more than 160,000 visitors. It was one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions. Neil MacGregor, the director of the museum, said that even though it opened until midnight every Saturday it could not accommodate everybody who wanted to see it and could have sold tickets “many times over”.

He added: “When it [the Tutankhamun exhibition]was proposed to us, we couldn’t consider it because we simply didn’t have the space.”

The exhibition centre will be built in Montague Place, in Bloomsbury, where there are offices that have been barely used since staff from the British Library moved out. The museum hopes to open the centre by 2011, and discussions are under way with the local council, the London Borough of Camden. The exhibition centre alone could span 1,000sq ft, subject to planning permission.

The plan is also to build a “world conservation centre”, where the public could see conservators at work, but it has yet to be decided whether it will be in the same building or whether they will be in two separate ones.

The museum said that 2.5 million visitors had accessed its collections at other venues in Britain and about 1.5 million through touring exhibitions overseas. It also announced that it had secured a permanent loan of Chinese treasures in a purpose-built gallery funded by Sir Joseph Hotung, a Hong Kong businessman and collector. He is believed to have donated £3 million to the project.

The collection, which was put together in the last century by Sir Percival David and Lady David, will be transferred next year from its home in a University of London site in Gor-don Square. It will be housed in the museum’s former music library, which has not been used since the British Library moved out.

Ther Percival David Foundation collection contains 1,752 ceramics from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties – the 10th to the early 20th century – and is unparalleled in quality outside China.

The museum also announced yesterday that 30,000 tickets have been booked for The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army – which will feature some of the greatest finds from the Chinese ruler’s treasure trove for the afterlife – two months before the exhibition opens.

“That is astonishing,” Mr MacGregor added. As many as 10,000 schoolchildren will also be coming for special visits.

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