Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is on Queens Road in Clifton, about half a mile from the city center of Bristol. Frederick Wills designed the present building in the Edwardian Baroque style. Work began in 1901, and it opened in February 1905. The tobacco baron Sir William Henry Wills offered £10,000 toward the site and the building.
The open plan is rectangular and has two sections. Each has a large hall under a barrel-vaulted glazed roof, and a double staircase joins them. Historic England made it Grade II* listed in 1966.
The museum's origins lie in 1823, when the Bristol Institution was founded. A bomb fire gutted the earlier building in 1940. Bristol City Council runs the museum, which has no entrance fee.
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