Hereford Museum and Art Gallery
Broad Street, Hereford HR4 9AU
THE BROAD STREET MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY IS CLOSED WHILE IT IS TRANSFORMED INTO THE NEW MUSEUM AND GALLERY CURRENTLY IT IS ANTICIPATED THAT OPENING WILL BE IN MID 2027. WE WILL KEEP THIS SITE UPDATED AS WE KNOW MORE.
Hereford Museum and Art Gallery is housed in a spectacular Victorian Gothic building. It has been exhibiting artefacts and works of fine and decorative art connected with the local area since 1874. Although the exterior of the building has changed very little, the museum and gallery interior had become outdated and not fit for their purpose as the main county repository of cultural heritage and history. The redevelopment project is a huge undertaking and will restore Hereford to its rightful position as a small city with much valuable history and collections, many housed in 21st century premises. The facilities to ensure easy, consistent, public access to see treasures held in the care of the Museum and Galleries team will attract locals and visitors from further afield, with bright modern showcases for collections currently stored or intermittently available during the construction period.
The beautiful Kenchester mosaic – whose removal from the staircase wall for storage was featured on YouTube videos and by those on hard hat tours in 2023 – will be relocated to a position where it will be more visible. Cirencester’s Corinium museum has this down to a fine art. Can Hereford raise the bar here?
The observation beehive is likely to be relocated to the rooftop where visitors to the outside cafe space and beacon viewing area can enjoy panoramic views of the city scape and further afield to Wales. Need we say, weather permitting.
The much loved Brian Hatton collection will have space in the upper gallery, and costumes from the valuable county collection will be on display in rotation. The overall plan is for the building to take the visitor on a journey through early history, as a Saxon and Norman settlement with strategic importance to the forces who battled in and fought for supremacy over it, to the travails of the Civil War era and onwards. The visitor pathway will take us into the modern era with the routes exhibiting in an holistic way the artefacts relevant to the period, rather than as standalone displays.
The galleries will be light, bright with flexible sized spaces more adaptable to the collections held in the county and, importantly, fit for purpose to host visiting temporary exhibitions. If the former gallery spaces admitted record number of visitors to the Lego and Grayson Perry exhibitions respectively prior to the building closure, immediately post lockdown and the building by then being unfit for more than ten people at a time, imagine the draw of a modernised facility. Not only do we local visitors benefit from modern facilities – we haven’t mentioned the cafe as yet – but the gallery will be eligible to have on loan collections from other museums with the assurance that environmental conditions are being met.
The Museum and Gallery will continue to be free admission to the standing collections with admission fees only for special exhibitions.
For more information about the Old House check the Council’s website; www.herefordshire.gov.uk/museums