In 1851, in a meeting of Hereford's Literary, Philosophical and Natural History Institution, a group of local gentlemen founded the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club. They named it for the Woolhope Dome, an outcrop of Silurian rocks at the village of Woolhope south-east of the city, and they set themselves the practical study, in all its branches, of the Natural History of Herefordshire. They collected fossils, walked the hills, identified mosses, argued about geology, and accumulated artefacts. By 1869, the club's president Sir James Rankin - a Member of Parliament and a man of considerable means - announced at his retirement speech that he would pay for a library and museum to house everything they had gathered. He put up 6,115 pounds toward the 7,600-pound cost. The City Council raised the rest. The foundation stone was laid in March 1873; the doors opened on 8 October 1874.

The Hereford Times called the new building truly an ornament of the city, and the Times was not wrong. Kempson had visited Venice. His design borrowed pointed arches, polychrome stonework, and a riot of carved zoology and botany around the entrance. On the ground floor were rooms meant for reading and committees - but money for display cases had not been included in the budget, so they were rented out as shops to raise the cash. A double-height lending library filled the rear. The museum and the Woolhope Club Room occupied the second floor. The third and fourth floors held the librarian and curator's apartment, with kitchen, scullery, sitting rooms, and bedrooms - because in 1874, that is where a curator lived. The whole arrangement is recognisably Victorian: a public institution stuffed with private lives and improvised funding.

The collection grew the way Victorian collections did - through donations from members of natural history societies, antiquarian groups, and gentleman amateurs. In 1927 a public appeal raised money to mount two Roman floor mosaics from Kenchester, a long-abandoned Roman town just west of Hereford, in the building's stairwell. By the time the museum closed in 2023, the cases held a startling range of things: a two-headed calf preserved as a curiosity, a two-metre fish, ceremonial swords, embroidered textiles, prehistoric tools, Victorian dolls, and during the summer months a working bee colony. The art gallery, added in 1912 with funding from Sir Joseph Pulley and his nephew Sir Charles Pulley, held a permanent display of works by Brian Hatton, the Hereford-born artist who painted horses and rural England before being killed in Egypt in 1916 during the First World War.

The museum's exhibitions could be unexpected. In 2006 the bicentennial of the watercolourist Joseph Murray Ince was celebrated. In 2007 the gallery hosted the designs of Christopher Dresser, the Victorian who is sometimes called the first industrial designer. In autumn 2020, during the brief gap between Covid lockdowns, The Ice Age in Herefordshire put a full-sized woolly mammoth replica in the centre of the room and asked visitors to imagine the county under ice. The following year, Grayson Perry's tapestry cycle The Vanity of Small Differences hung in the gallery - six large works inspired by Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, tracing class mobility through contemporary England. Among the permanent treasures: the original seals of Owain Glyndwr, used by the Welsh prince to authenticate documents during his early 15th-century revolt against English rule.

By the 2020s the building was straining. Asbestos removal in 2015 had forced a two-year closure. Post-Covid fire regulations capped the number of visitors at ten people at a time. In July 2023 the doors closed for a full redevelopment funded by 5 million pounds from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, 8 million from Herefordshire Council, and 5 million from the Stronger Towns Fund. The plans are ambitious: new galleries, restoration of the Woolhope Club Room, a temporary exhibition space, a rooftop cafe, and a new floor with a viewing beacon and roof terrace that will give 360-degree views over the city. When it reopens, visitors will be able to look out across Broad Street toward the cathedral and the bend of the Wye - the same view Sir James Rankin saw in 1870 when he decided Hereford needed a museum.