Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum - Gloucester, UK - Architecture Prizes on Waymarking.com

The building is Grade II listed with the entry at the English Heritage website telling us:

HM Custom and Excise Office, now museum. Completed 1845, by Sydney Smirke for the Customs Commissioners. Minor alterations c1985 for conversion as the Regiments of Gloucestershire Museum. Ashlar to front and sides, brick at rear, slate roof, brick stack. Symmetrical double-depth block; the C20 entrance to museum at rear is approached from the Docks.

EXTERIOR: two storeys and basement. Symmetrical front to Commercial Road; offset plinth, raised bands at first floor and first-floor sill levels, crowning cornice and a coped parapet; at the outer corners between the plinth and the first-floor band, and between the first-floor sill band and the crowning cornice, are long raised and chamfered quoins. On the ground floor in the centre a porch of slight projection, the open front framed by pilasters and entablature with parapet above; flanking the porch on either side a sash with a further sash widely spaced to left and right in plain openings with projecting stone sills. On the first floor the same pattern of openings with three closely spaced sashes in the centre and a architraves and floating cornices. All the sashes with glazing bars (3x4 panes). Set above the centre of the parapet the royal arms carved in stone. Elevation at each end has three sashes on each floor with details are similar to the front. Rear elevation facing the Docks of brick, with late C20 glazed extension.

INTERIOR: not inspected.

HISTORY: built in order to handle the great expansion of foreign trade passing through Gloucester Docks in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Scottish Architects website tells us about Sydney Smirke:

Sydney Smirke was born in London on 20 December 1797, the fifth and youngest son of Robert Smirke RA, painter and illustrator, and his wife Elizabeth. He was baptised on 14 Jan 1798. He was educated at Eywood, Herefordshire, studying under a private tutor with Lord Oxford's eldest son. At the age of about eighteen he entered the office of his eldest brother Sir Robert Smirke and studied at the Royal Academy Schools, winning the Gold Medal in 1819. This enabled him to visit Italy and Sicily. In 1827 he obtained a clerkship of the Kings' Works, engaged on St James's Palace, at which point his career temporarily diverged from that of his brother. The post was abolished in 1832, but in the following year he obtained his first major commission, the reconstruction of the Pantheon in London's Oxford Street, and gradually built up a large practice, partly from clients passed on to him by his elder brother, enabling him to marry Isabella Dobson, daughter of the architect John Dobson of Newcastle.

Sydney Smirke succeeded to his brother's practice in 1846, retaining the Surveyorship of the Inner Temple, the Duchy of Lancaster, the British Museum and the General Post Office. He was admitted FRIBA surprisingly late on 29 April 1844, his proposers being Sir William Tite, Thomas Henry Wyatt, Edward Buckton Lamb and the Catholic architect Joseph John Scoles. He received the Royal Gold Medal in 1860 and was Professor of Architecture 1861-65 at the Royal Academy where he reconstructed their buildings between 1867 and 1872, his last major work. He died at Tunbridge Wells on 8 December 1877, leaving estate of £80,000.