What functions today as a civic building occupies the footprint, and possibly incorporates the fabric, of a structure that has served in turn as a gentleman's mansion, a coaching inn, and a municipal hall across three centuries.

The story begins in the late seventeenth century, when a mansion was built on this site by Richard Hamerton. At some point during the eighteenth century the building changed character entirely, reopening as the Great Globe Inn. By 1826 it had taken the form of a five-bay, two-storey structure with four attic windows and two centrally placed chimneys set diagonally, a detail that gives it a faintly idiosyncratic silhouette in period depictions. That image of the inn is the clearest visual record of what stood here before the present building arrived. In 1881 the whole thing was rebuilt as a Town Hall, absorbing or replacing whatever survived of Hamerton's original mansion and the inn that succeeded it. The result is a building whose current appearance gives little outward sign of what came before, though the continuity of use on the same plot stretches back more than three hundred years.