The borough consisted of part of St Germans parish in South-East Cornwall, a coastal town too small to have a mayor and corporation, where the chief economic activity was fishing.
The right to vote rested in theory with all (adult male) householders, but in practice only a handful (who called themselves freemen) exercised the right; there were only seven voters in 1831.
The boundaries excluded part of the town, which consisted of 124 houses in total, but this was still far too small to justify its retaining its representation, and St Germans was disfranchised by the Reform Act in 1832.
The decision, however, was controversial: the whole parish (of which the town made up only a fraction) had a population in the 1821 census of 2,404, and the initial proposal was that St Germans should lose only one of its two MPs.
The bill's schedules were amended so as to extinguish both of the St Germans MPs, saving instead the second MP at Penryn (where the boundaries had been extended to take in the neighbouring town of Falmouth).