Cuthbert Grundy was described in his lifetime as "a leader of the artistic, literary and scientific life of the town," which is the sort of phrase Edwardian Blackpool reserved for people who actually showed up to committees. The brothers' bequest came with a vision: a permanent home for serious art in a resort that mostly looked the other way. The architects Cullen, Lochhead and Brown obliged, designing a building that announced its purpose without grandstanding. By 1912 a purchase fund was already buying new works to grow the founding thirty-three. By the late 1930s the collection had outgrown its rooms, and two new galleries were tacked on in 1938. The original thirty-three has since become 2,315 objects, split between fine art, decorative pieces, modern jewellery, and ephemera that documents a century of Blackpool life.

The collection is the kind that rewards a slow walk. Augustus John's portrait Aircraftsman Shaw watches from one wall, a study of T. E. Lawrence in his enlisted disguise. Paul Nash's Sanctuary Wood carries the haunted weight Nash brought back from the trenches. Eric Ravilious turns up with The Yellow Funnel, all crisp marine geometry. Lucy Kemp-Welch's The Waterway and John Linnell's Woods and Forests round out a set of British paintings that punches well above its postcode. Stanhope Forbes is here. So is Laura Knight, alongside her husband Harold. Henry Scott Tuke's seaside swimmers feel particularly at home on the Lancashire coast. The gallery is also a long-standing member of the Contemporary Art Society and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, which is bureaucratic language for: this place is taken seriously by people who take art seriously.

Recent programming has leaned into ambition. In 2016 the Grundy hosted Neon: The Charged Line, billed as Britain's biggest survey of neon art, with work by Joseph Kosuth, Tracey Emin, and Gavin Turk lighting up galleries built for Victorian oils. Grayson Perry's The Vanity of Small Differences arrived in 2018. Artist Rooms brought Roy Lichtenstein the following year, then Louise Bourgeois in 2023. Bloomberg New Contemporaries came the same year, sampling whatever the next generation of British art schools is making. Since 2018 the gallery has been curated by Paulette Brien, who has steadied a programme that swings between historic British landscape and conceptual work without ever feeling like it is showing off.

In 2022 Blackpool received a Shared Prosperity Fund grant of nearly six million pounds, part of the government's Levelling Up money, and a feasibility study began on extending the Grundy and adjacent Central Library into a neighbouring car park. The study projected 59,000 additional visitors a year, including 15,000 tourists who might otherwise have left the resort thinking Blackpool was only candyfloss and trams. Ellis Williams Architects were appointed to lead the design. The Grundy and Central Library were jointly Grade II listed on the 20th of October 1983, and any extension has to live up to that pedigree. The gallery remains accessible by steps with wheelchair access to the ground floor, and the shop specialises in artist-made jewellery, which feels like exactly the sort of detail the Grundy brothers would have approved of.