The museum is housed in a former Victorian courtroom, prison, and police station and is therefore a historic site where an individual could be arrested, tried, sentenced and executed.

The Nottingham Courant in March 1724 recorded:[3] On Monday morning after the Judge had gone into the County Hall, and a great crowd of people being there, a tracing or two that supported the floor broke and fell in and several people fell in with it, about three yards into the cellar underneath.

This caused a great consternation in the Court, some apprehending the Hall might fall, others crying out fire etc.

The design for the building involved an asymmetrical main frontage facing onto High Pavement: the right hand section of three bays featured a round headed doorway flanked by two round headed windows and full-height Ionic order columns; there was a rectangular blank panel above the doorway flanked by roundels.

[7] A new grand jury room was added in 1859 to designs by the architect Richard Charles Sutton.

[8] Executions were held on a scaffold erected over the stone steps in front of the central doorway, within the small enclosure created by closing the gates of the iron railings.

[9] In 1876, major improvements were made and the front was redesigned in an Italianate style by William Bliss Sanders of Nottingham.

After the County Council moved to County Hall (a larger and more modern complex located on the south bank of the River Trent) in 1954, the Shire Hall continued in use as the home of Nottingham's civil and criminal courts until 1991, when Nottingham Crown Court was opened on Canal Street.