The complex, which includes a museum, an art gallery and a library and incorporates a structure which was once the shire hall for Brecknockshire, is a Grade II* listed building.

[2][3] It was designed by Thomas Henry Wyatt and David Brandon in the neoclassical style, built in ashlar stone and was completed in 1843.

[1] The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with five bays facing the corner of Bulwark and Danygaer Road; the central section of three bays featured a full height tetrastyle portico with Doric order columns supporting an entablature inscribed with the words "Victoria Regina MDCCCXLII", as well as a frieze with triglyphs and a modillioned pediment.

[6][7][8] The Brecknock Museum, which had been established in an old chapel further to the west along Glamorgan Street in 1928,[9][10] moved into the vacant shire hall in 1974.

[11] Highlights of the collection included a tombstone of a young cavalryman called Candidus, found at Y Gaer, a local Roman fort.