Qualla: Old House of Keys

Old House of Keys: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander P Kapp, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk in the door and the doorkeeper hands you a card with a name on it. You are now William Callister of Ramsey, or Mark Hildesley Quayle of Bridge House, and in a few minutes you will be expected to vote on whether to widen the franchise of the Manx parliament. The Old House of Keys in Castletown is a museum that demands you do more than look. It is a small Georgian chamber, twenty-four green leather benches arranged in a semicircle around the Speaker's chair, and Manx National Heritage have restored it to look exactly as it did on a particular afternoon in 1866 when Tynwald was about to change forever. The building is across the street from Castle Rushen, in the old capital. Both the castle and the chamber speak to the same long story: how a small island in the Irish Sea built one of the most enduring forms of self-government on earth.

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Image: Alexander P Kapp | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old House of Keys: A Chamber Demanded by a Royal Commission

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Finn Bjorklid, Public domain. Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man, is generally reckoned to be the oldest continuously running parliament in the world, with origins in the tenth century and possibly the eighth. By the sixteenth century it had divided into an upper house and a lower house known as the K...

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Image: Finn Bjorklid | Public domain

Old House of Keys: Where the Vote Came From

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Finn Bjorklid, Public domain. For most of its history the House of Keys was self-elected: when a member died or resigned, the remaining twenty-four chose his replacement from a list. The chamber in Castletown is where that ended. In 1866 the Keys themselves voted to be elected by popular vote, a decision that...

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Image: Finn Bjorklid | Public domain

Old House of Keys: What Banks Do to Buildings

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Faherty, CC BY-SA 2.0. After the Keys departed, the building became a bank. Dumbell's Bank stripped out the chamber's ceiling, punched a great skylight through the roof to flood the hall with light, and painted the new banking hall an expensive blue. When Dumbell's collapsed in 1900, taking many Manx s...

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Image: Mike Faherty | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old House of Keys: Restoration by Inference

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wilkinson from London, CC BY-SA 2.0. Manx National Heritage took on the building in 2000 with the strange task of reconstructing an interior nobody had ever photographed. No images of the chamber survived. They had to rely on written descriptions, inventories of furniture, and the proportions of the rooms themselves...

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Image: Andrew Wilkinson from London | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old House of Keys: The Vote Today

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tynwald still sits. The Keys are now elected by universal suffrage and meet in the Legislative Buildings in Douglas, in a chamber that descends in unbroken line from the one you sit in at Castletown. Every July, on Tynwald Day, the Manx parliament processes out to Tynwald Hill at...

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Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0