Qualla: Hereford Museum and Art Gallery

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY 4.0. The facade is carved with the signs of the zodiac and a small zoo of animals and plants, none of which look quite like they belong in Hereford. Frederick Robertson Kempson designed the building in 1873 in the Venetian Gothic style - as if a piece of the Doge's Palace had been picked up, lightly weathered, and dropped onto Broad Street between a Tesco and a pedestrianised market square. For 149 years the museum behind that facade has held an unlikely mix of treasures: a two-headed calf, a two-metre fish, Roman floor mosaics rescued from a vanished town, and the seals that the Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr once pressed into hot wax. The doors closed in July 2023. Behind them, an 18-million-pound redevelopment is underway.

Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY 4.0

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: The Naturalists Who Built a Museum

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hrefordexplorer, CC0. 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 cit...

Image: Hrefordexplorer | CC0

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: An Ornament of the City

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Sharville, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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...

Image: Ruth Sharville | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: What the Cases Held

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: Rept0n1x | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: Glyndwr's Seals and the Vanity of Small Differences

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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, duri...

Image: Rept0n1x | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hereford Museum and Art Gallery: Closed for Reinvention

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Robert Marshall, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

Image: Brian Robert Marshall | CC BY-SA 2.0