The Parade is a small park in the middle of Hugh Town, almost the geographic centre of the narrow isthmus that joins the Garrison peninsula to the rest of St Mary's. Two centuries ago it was a drilling square. Volunteers of the Sea Fencibles, a Napoleonic-era coastal home guard, paraded here in expectation of a French invasion that never quite materialised. In 1889, when the threat of Napoleon was long gone and the islands needed civic infrastructure, a granite-fronted neoclassical hall was built across the southern end of the park. It became the seat of the sui generis local government of the Isles of Scilly. It is being rebuilt now to become the islands' museum.
The building was commissioned by Algernon Dorrien-Smith, the heir to a singular Scillonian institution. His uncle Augustus Smith had acquired a lease over the Isles of Scilly from the Duchy of Cornwall for 20,000 pounds in 1834 and styled himself Lord Proprietor of the Isles of Scilly, a title without precedent and never quite repeated. The Dorrien-Smith family still holds the lease for the island of Tresco today. The new hall was intended for a market and public rooms. The architect, J. Goodfellow, designed it in the neoclassical style and built it from coursed granite quarried locally, with a slate roof and a symmetrical three-bay frontage facing onto The Parade. It was completed in 1889.
In 1891 the Isles of Scilly Rural District Council was created as a sui generis local government authority, formally outside the administrative county of Cornwall. The council based itself in the town hall. After the Local Government Act 1972 it was renamed as the Council of the Isles of Scilly, and it remains the smallest unitary council in England. About two thousand people live across the inhabited islands. The council employs roughly 130 staff full-time, providing water supply, air traffic control at St Mary's Airport, and the rest of the apparatus that more populous councils would distribute across a dozen agencies. Around ten percent of the islands' adult population is connected to the council, either as employee or as elected councillor.
The building is two storeys of squared and coursed granite under a slate roof. The main frontage faces north onto The Parade in three symmetrical bays. The central bay holds a doorway flanked by two sash windows; the first floor carries three more sash windows; and every opening has segmental surrounds with carved keystones. A pediment rises above the roofline, with a date stone in the middle and two small windows in the tympanum on either side. The Council added an extension in 1970 to provide more office space. In 1992 the entire structure was protected as a Grade II listed building. It remains, in the language of architectural historians, a confident provincial neoclassical, the right scale for a small civic centre on a small island.
By the 2010s the building was struggling. The stage area inside was condemned in 2017. The council had already relocated its council chamber to the Old Wesleyan Chapel on Garrison Lane in 2002, leaving the hall mostly to its smaller offices and an aging interior. Then the Isles of Scilly Museum, whose own 1967 building on Church Street had been condemned in 2019, started moving its collections into temporary storage in the hall in 2020. The two needs converged. In April 2024, the council was awarded a 4.6 million pound National Lottery Heritage Fund grant. The grant will fund a full restoration and the conversion of the building into a cultural centre and the new home of the Isles of Scilly Museum.
There is something fitting about the conversion. The Parade has gone, in roughly two centuries, from being a place where local volunteers prepared to fight Napoleon, to a Victorian market hall and council chamber, to a 21st-century museum housing Iron Age swords and shipwrecked cargo. Each layer is still legible in the granite. The Sea Fencibles' drill ground is now the green in front of the doors; the date stone in the pediment still records 1889; the council offices still operate inside; and the temporary museum storage upstairs is already filling with artefacts waiting to come back into public view. The reopening is planned for spring 2026.
Coordinates: 49.9145°N, 6.3152°W. The town hall sits at the centre of Hugh Town, facing onto The Parade. From 2,000 feet over St Mary's the building reads as a slate roof at the head of a small green square, midway between Town Beach to the north and Porthcressa to the south. St Mary's Airport (EGHE) is one mile to the east. The hall is best paired visually with the Garrison peninsula and Star Castle just to the west, and with the harbour quay to the north.
Coordinates: 49.9145°N, 6.3152°W. The town hall sits at the centre of Hugh Town, facing onto The Parade. From 2,000 feet over St Mary's the building reads as a slate roof at the head of a small green square, midway between Town Beach to the north and Porthcressa to the south. St Mary's Airport (EGHE) is one mile to the east. The hall is best paired visually with the Garrison peninsula and Star Castle just to the west, and with the harbour quay to the north.