The colonnaded structure standing there today dates from 1761, but its open loggia occupies the exact footprint of a predecessor that was demolished the year before, a building that had served the city for the better part of two centuries and yet left almost no physical trace above ground.

A tholsel, to use the medieval term, was the kind of multipurpose civic building common in Irish and English towns, functioning simultaneously as town hall, court house, and market house. Kilkenny's earlier version appears to have been built in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century; by 1619 an inquisition was being held in what the record calls 'le new Tholsell', which implies the building was recent enough that the label still stuck. It was not especially large. A visitor passing through in 1730 described it as 'remarkable; though small, it is very neat.' The Corporation minute book records rebuilding work in 1695, and by 1753 a bricklayer was being paid for arching under the market section at ground-floor level, where four stalls or shops were rented out to tenants. Above them, the upper floor served as the City Chambers. John Roque's map of 1758, made just two years before the building came down, shows it projecting out into the street, with a narrow lane running westward from Saint Mary's Lane providing access to the rear. That map is one of the clearest records of what the building looked like in its final years. It was demolished in 1760, replaced almost immediately by the present structure, whose loggia now stands where those rented market stalls once were.