A UNIQUE conservation project is taking shape in a vast underground vault at Wakehurst Place, near Ardingly. The Millennium Seedbank will store the seeds of ten per cent of the world's wild plants for future generations. PHIL DENNETT investigates.

IT looks like a giant grey underground car park nestling in the countryside.

But the chill in the room is a reminder that it will one day save thousands of plants under deep freeze for future generations in one of the world's biggest conservation schemes.

This is the 'cold room' at the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building, thrown open to the media for the first time.

The Millennium Seedbank at Wakehurst Place, near Ardingly, will be the largest in the world dedicated to conserving wild plants.

Its site spreads over enough land for six soccer pitches and progress has been watched by thousands of people visiting neighbouring Wakehurst Gardens.

Scientists are making preparations to fill the -20 degree deep-freeze chambers with the seed of every type of wild plant in the UK by next year.

Over the following decade scientists will add ten per cent of all the wild plant species in the world to the collection, about 24,000 in all.

Searchers will literally be hanging off cliffs in some far-flung continent to bring back the rarer species.

The scheme sprang from a convention on biological diversity agreed at the United Earth Summit in 1992, where governments recognised that plants facing extinction had to be saved.

The surface part of the project is the public face of the seedbank.

At the moment the arched structures for exhibition and public display areas look like the start of a rail station without the trains.

Roger Smith, head of the seed conservation department at Kew Gardens, is so enthusiastic about the project he almost cringes at the description.

Kew, which is running the project, expects the first members of the public to be admitted in autumn 2000.

It was Roger who suggested the seedbank scheme. He says: "The analogy I use is of me being an old man sitting on Hove seafront and a small boy coming up to me and asking what I did.

"And I could give the boy one of two answers. I could say we saw a problem and tried to do something about it, or I could say we did nothing and sat on our hands.

"Nobody needs to be convinced any more of the need for conservation - David Attenborough did that superbly.

"All that needs to be done now is to maintain their interest and show them what is being done.

"And that is one of the things we want to achieve at the Millennium Seedbank.

"This is lottery money we are using, given to us by the public.

"The whole point is that there would have been no project without their money."

The project was given £30 million by the Millennium Commission towards the £80.6 million cost.

The Wellcome Trust gave £9.2 million and communications firm Orange has pledged £2.5 million over ten years, with the rest coming from a public appeal.

Crawley firm Longleys expects to finish the main building work next April.

The seedbank centre will also be a huge melting pot of research and education.

Once it is up and running, hundreds of experts from across the globe will visit the centre to swap ideas with scientists about conservation.

David Attenborough, who launched an appeal to raise money for the project in 1996, said: "It is perhaps the most significant conservation initiative ever undertaken."

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