York Minster has lodged a revised bid for £10 million of Lottery money to help fund a massive restoration project.

The Dean of York, the Very Rev Keith Jones, and other staff submitted several crates full of documents to the Heritage Lottery Fund last month.

The Dean said today it would be four months or so before the cathedral discovered the outcome of its application, but said: “I believe that the long and hard work has resulted in an application of which we can be proud.”

The Dean said that if the bid did succeed, he hoped work on the York Minster Revealed project could start before the end of this year.

He revealed in December that the Minster’s first bid for lottery funds a couple of years ago had not been good enough, but said the project team had been working very hard to prepare an excellent bid that would meet the Fund’s demands.

He said that while the timescale had been delayed since the restoration project was first unveiled early in 2007, the time had not been wasted, with staff deployed on other tasks.

A primary aim of the project is to restore the Great East Window to its former glory but there are also several other elements, including a stylish new piazza entranceway into the South Transept, involving a “vesica” shaped construction of magnesian limestone to provide gently sloping ramps and steps up to the doorway.

There will be vastly improved toilet facilities to cope with the cathedral’s thousands of visitors, new digital and computer-generated imagery displays to educate visitors on the history, purpose and evolving nature of the cathedral and new ramps in the Undercroft to ensure full disabled access, with glass pathways to give people a clear view of the archaeology below.

A new glass-fronted lift will also be installed into the undercroft and the South Transept will lose its ticket booths, with tickets being sold in future at the Minster shop, in nearby Minster Gates.

Another aim is to recruit, enthuse and train future generations of craftspeople in the skills of stone carving and stained glass conservation as the restoration of the crumbling East Front gathers pace.