The Kelvingrove art gallery and museum in Glasgow. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
Please don't hate me, but I've got what's probably the cushiest job going. OK, so it's not salaried - but when you spend your days looking around the most exciting, avant-garde, up-to-the-minute museums in Britain, there are definitely other compensations.
I'm one of the judges of this year's Gulbenkian Prize for Britain's best museum or art gallery - and today we unveil our shortlist, four fabulous establishments well worth a detour if you're travelling around the country over Easter.
In no particular order, here's our selection:
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, has recently completed a three-year, £35m renovation programme - one of the biggest and boldest arts renovation projects in the country in years. There are more than 8,500 objects on display, ranging from Botticelli's The Annunciation to stuffed stags; from designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh to displays telling the story of how Scotland looked around 400 million years ago, when it was a desert dotted with fish-filled lochs.
Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex, is home to one of the best collections of British art in the world. We loved the mix of contemporary and original, with a new £8.6m extension alongside the Grade 1 listed Queen Anne townhouse. And there's old and new inside: 20,000 mussel shells inlaid with crimson velvet lining the walls of the 18th century stairwell in Susie MacMurray's installation Shell, while artists in the permanent collection include Lucian Freud, Eric Gill, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, John Piper, Walter Sickert and Graham Sutherland.
Kew Palace in west London is Britain's smallest royal palace, and we were astonished by the detail and intimacy the restorers have managed to pack into the new visitor experience there. Rooms unseen by the public for years are recreated in extraordinarily garish Georgian colour schemes (that somehow manage to work): but the real treasure here is the insight into the loving, and yet ultimately tragic, lives of George III, his wife Charlotte and their 15 children.
Weston Park Museum in Sheffield was an ordinary town museum until £19m, along with a huge amount of hard work and imagination, transformed it into one of the most vibrant and lively places in town. It's packed with unusual and eclectic treasures from archaeology and natural and social history - and the people of the town voted with their feet when more than 55,000 visitors flocked through the doors in the first fortnight after it re-opened.
Now I know I have to say this, but the truth is that any one of the shortlisted museums would be a worthy winner of the Gulbenkian (which at £100,000 is the country's most valuable arts prize). So if you have time to visit one, tell us what you think - go to www.thegulbenkianprize.org.uk. We'll announce our winner on May 25.
