Leslie Kelly, the town clerk in the early 1950s, tabled fresh proposals and the commissioners chose a site on the northeast side of Derby Road. The architects designed the building in the modern style of the period - clean lines, brown brick, no Victorian flourishes. It opened on 13 February 1958. The asymmetrical facade ran four bays along Derby Road, with three columned bays to the left supporting a stuccoed first floor that projected slightly forward, fenestrated by a single wide casement window. The right-hand bay pushed further out, with steps climbing to a doorway and a small gable above. A flagpole was bolted to the brickwork beside the upper window. Inside, the board room - where the commissioners would conduct their meetings - was the principal space. After seven decades of operating out of a borrowed office, Peel finally had a civic building of its own.

Here is the small irony of Peel Town Hall: it could host the commissioners but never the town. When the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, Sir Ronald Garvey, visited Peel in October 1959, the public meeting in his honour took place across Derby Road at the Corrin Memorial Church Hall - a building that had been dedicated in 1923 in memory of the same family whose bequest had funded the town hall itself. The pattern repeated whenever Peel had something substantial to say to itself. The official building handled the official business; the church hall handled the actual crowds. Two civic spaces, separated by a street, dividing the work of being a town between them.

Step inside and the works on the walls trace local pride in local hands. Two landscapes by Charles Hugh Cook Wells - one called Behind Peel Hill, the other Peel from the North. Two more by J. M. Butterworth, Peel Harbour and Glenfaba Bridge, the curve of the river and the working waterfront. A landscape called simply Peel by John Miller Nicholson, one of the most respected Manx artists of his generation. And in a register all its own, a painting titled The Diamond King by John Holland - a portrait reaching back to Joseph Mylchreest, the Peel-born diamond prospector who made his fortune diamond mining in South Africa before returning home in 1888. The art on these walls is local, painted by local hands, of local scenes and local figures. For a town that took until 1958 to build itself a town hall, the choice of what to hang inside reads like a quiet statement about who Peel thought it was.

In November 2021, Peel submitted a bid for city status to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. The submission was titled, in Manx and English, A Bid for City Status from the Town of Purt ny Hinshey (Peel), Isle of Man. It was a striking thing for a place of around five thousand people to attempt - and a reminder that Peel has always carried itself with more weight than its size suggests. The bid did not succeed. But the town hall, modest as it is, has now served as the meeting place of Peel Town Commissioners for nearly seventy years, watching the town it represents argue gently for a slightly larger version of itself.