Holyhead Town Hall was constructed in 1875 to the design of John Thomas, architect and county surveyor, Caernarfon, at a cost of £3,000, funded by £5 shares in a company established for the purpose in December 1873. The building was opened on 31 October 1875 in a ceremony led by Morgan Lloyd, M.P. featuring a number of musical concerts. In the early twentieth century, the building was also used as a cinema from c.1910 and later as a public library as well as town hall.

The high-Victorian Gothic-style building is built of Aston Hall yellow bricks and Ruabon free stones, the sides of local stone with brick dressings. It is of two storeys and five bays with a three-storey gabled central bay, the bays separated by prominent buttresses. The ground-floor windows in the first, second, fourth, and fifth bays have shallowly pointed heads while the second-storey windows are under pointed arches with hoodmoulds. The entrance is through a gabled porch in the central bay above which are paired second-storey sash windows and smaller third-storey windows under pointed arches above which is a circular opening, all within a recessed pointed archway with hoodmoulds. Both gable-ends have large chimneys.

The interior was described in an 1875 newspaper article as consisting of an entrance hall, assembly hall (which sat 900 people and contained a gallery, stage and two dressing rooms), a club room, a Freemasons? ante-room and room, a reading room, two book stores, a bonded store, a committee room, two lavatories and three hall keepers? rooms. The entrance hall and assembly room had wooden ceilings, the supporting timbers of which were varnished, with the boards pained light blue. The entrance hall had decorative tiles by Mr. H. C. Webb, Worcester, and chimney pieces of enamelled slate by Messers Nicoll and Owen, Caernarfon.

(Sources: `Opening of the Holyhead Town Hall?, North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser for the Principality, 04.09.1875, Welsh Newspapers Online; C. Rees and M. Jones, `Building Recording & Analysis at Empire Cinema, Stanley Street, Holyhead? C.R. Archaeology on behalf of Isle of Anglesey County Council (2013); Richard Haslam, Julian Orbach and Adam Voelcker, The Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 131)
A.N. Coward, RCAHMW, 08.01.2019