[1] Bury Art Museum's collection was established, in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with the gift of more than 200 oil paintings, watercolours, prints and ceramics accumulated by the Victorian paper manufacturer Thomas Wrigley (1808–1880), on the condition that suitable premises should be built to house the collection.

The present building was designed by the Manchester firm of Woodhouse and Willoughby, and was opened by Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby on 9 October 1901.

[2] The museum's Wrigley Collection is an assemblage of more than two hundred oil paintings, watercolours, prints and ceramics, which includes works by J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Edwin Landseer, and George Clausen.

There are twentieth-century paintings by artists such as Victor Pasmore and Edward Burra, and the museum also holds more recent twenty-first-century art works.

This includes a combined Museum and Archives Centre which, based on a radical re-think, uses artefacts, documentation and art to tell the story of the town.