The structure, which accommodates the offices and meeting place of Beccles Town Council, is a Grade II listed building.

[2][3][4][5] The lord of the manor, Robert Sparrow, agreed to grant the building to trustees in 1765,[6] at which time it was substantially rebuilt.

The outer bays, which were canted giving the building an elongated octagonal shape, featured arched windows on the ground floor and single-light gothic-style casement windows on the first floor, and it originally had an octagonal turret above the doorway.

[1] In the 19th century the courtroom served as the venue for both the quarters sessions and the petty sessions,[4] and, following significant population growth, largely associated with the status of Beccles as a market town, the area became a municipal borough with the town hall as its headquarters in 1835.

[14] A finely sculpted coat of arms of Queen Elizabeth I dated 1589 was recovered from a timber-framed house on the south side of New Market and installed in the town wall in the 1980s,[7][15] and a plaque to celebrate the life of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin, was installed on the south elevation of the town hall following her death in 1994.