Thomas Penson's career runs through the architectural infrastructure of mid-Victorian north-east Wales - he designed the Cefn Mawr viaduct, the Whitchurch and Crewe railway stations, Christ Church at Welshpool, and dozens of other public buildings. The County Buildings on Regent Street were commissioned as militia barracks during the period when Britain raised local volunteer forces against the threat of French invasion and later as part of the Victorian Auxiliary Forces. When the military function ended, the building took on civil duties: police station, magistrates' court, the everyday machinery of small-town justice. The police vacated in 1976-1977 and the local art college took over part of the space. Then in 1996, Wrexham County Borough was reformed from the older Clwyd district arrangements, and the new council needed a museum. The empty building, in a city-centre location, with appropriate Victorian dignity, became Wrexham County Borough Museum.

The collection numbers over 16,000 objects, not all on display at any one time. Gallery One covers the archaeology and social history of Wrexham County Borough - flints from the Mesolithic period, Roman material from the Plas Coch civilian settlement, medieval pottery, coal-mining lamps from the great pits that defined the area's industrial life. Gallery Two displays loan objects from Amgueddfa Cymru - the National Museum of Wales - and from the National Library of Wales, the kind of touring partnership a regional museum needs to bring in nationally significant material. Gallery Three rotates temporary shows. The 2021 exhibition was on the Roman history of Holt, the village downriver where Edward I's pentagonal castle once stood. There is also a Time Tunnel, an immersive walk-through display of local industry - coal, iron, steel, brick, tile, terracotta - that connects the small objects in cases with the landscapes outside the city. The Royal Welch Fusiliers archive is here too, including original documents in the handwriting of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, both of whom served in the regiment during the First World War.

The Wrexham Archives are housed inside the museum but operate as a distinct service. They were named in 2002 in honour of Alfred Neobard Palmer, the Wrexham-born local historian who did more than anyone in the late 19th century to document the town's medieval and early modern past. Palmer wrote multi-volume histories of the parish, the gilds, the township boundaries, the families - foundational works that local historians still rely on. The A. N. Palmer Centre for Local Studies and Archives, opened 2002, holds the parish registers, photographs, family papers, business records, and maps that document how Wrexham became what it is. In 2009 a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of GBP 950,000 funded a refurbishment: a glass extension at the front, more of the building opened up for display, the whole museum reopened on Valentine's Day 2011. A 2016 plan to outsource the museum and library to an external culture trust - first a South Wales trust, later a Blaenau Gwent or Merthyr Tydfil trust, eventually a local one - was scrapped after councillor opposition.

By 2026 the building takes on its next identity. The upper floor, currently partly vacant, becomes the home of the new Welsh Football Museum, the long-awaited national institution for a country whose oldest professional club plays a few streets away. The combined facility - football galleries and local history galleries side by side - will be called the Museum of Two Halves. The architects are Purcell, a firm whose other work includes Westminster Abbey. The Welsh Government provided GBP 5.4 million in February 2024. The football collection that has quietly accumulated in storage - 2,000 items, the largest such holding in Wales - finally gets proper display space. The Roman material, the Victorian household objects, the coal-mining lamps, and the football caps from the 1890s will share a building. It is a coherent enough combination for Wrexham, a city whose history is more or less inseparable from coal, brick, and football. The Mold gold cape - the Bronze Age ceremonial cape found near Mold in 1833, one of the great archaeological treasures of north-east Wales - sometimes comes here on loan from the British Museum. Some of the objects on Regent Street have been in this corner of Wales for four thousand years.