When the Local Government Act of 1886 turned Port St Mary into a village district with elected commissioners, the local merchants wanted a building to match. They formed the Port St Mary Public Hall Company Limited, appointed a shipping clerk named Frank Strickland as secretary, and bought a plot on The Promenade from a landowner named John Sainsbury in 1897. The architect they hired had ideas above the village's station. The completed hall, finished in 1898, has a five-bay frontage in rubble masonry, with the central three bays slightly projected and capped by a pediment supported by paired Doric pilasters. There are sash windows with round heads, external porch staircases on both sides, and on the northeast face a Venetian window with a clock set above it - a small village wearing the clothes of a much grander town.

What sits beneath the building is older than anything visible above it. The plot on the south side of The Promenade had once been occupied by the Chapel of St Mary - the keeill that gave the village its name in Manx, Purt le Moirrey, harbour of St Mary's church. By the time the Public Hall Company purchased the land, the chapel and its burial ground had long disappeared. The promoters of the 1898 hall almost certainly knew they were building over consecrated ground, but the Victorian century was not sentimental about such things. The new structure replaced the old one entirely, and the dance floor went down where graves had once been. The town still pronounces the saint's name in every signpost, even if nobody can show you the chapel.

The shareholders had hoped the hall would pay its way through bookings, performances, and the lucrative business of social dancing in a Victorian seaside village. It did not. Forty years of disappointing returns ended in November 1938, when the Port St Mary Commissioners bought the building from the company for £1,500. The Commissioners refurbished the interior, moved their offices in, and on 22 November 1939 the deemster - Percy Cowley, one of the most influential Manxmen of his generation - re-opened the structure as Port St Mary Town Hall. The country was three months into another world war by then, and the building's identity as a working seat of local government has remained essentially unchanged ever since.

In May 2023 the town hall hosted an exhibition that reached past the village toward something the village had lost. The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company vessel Mona's Queen sailed for Dunkirk in May 1940 with a crew that included men from Port St Mary. Heading into the harbour during Operation Dynamo, she struck a sea mine just outside the entrance and sank in two minutes. Twenty-four crew died. The exhibition gathered photographs, letters and the testimony of families - the kind of material that, on an island this small, has rarely traveled far from the houses where the news first arrived. The starboard anchor of Mona's Queen was raised from the seabed in 2010 and now stands at Kallow Point a few hundred yards south of the hall, anchor and building part of the same conversation about who the village remembers.

Inside the assembly hall, the original sprung maple floor still serves - now for community theatre, pantomimes, and the occasional Pride-themed film festival that the island's culture has finally made room for. The Commissioners hold their meetings here. A tourist information desk operates upstairs in season. The 2018 statement in Tynwald that "it appears that Port St Mary Commissioners lurch inelegantly from one crisis to another" has become a kind of local affection - quoted, framed, refused. A village of two thousand people that has been arguing about itself in the same building for nearly a century has earned the right to keep arguing.