The Hôtel de Ville of Versailles — the town hall — is a mid-19th-century building set back from the Rue de la Paroisse, the main street connecting the palace to the town centre. It is not a remarkable building architecturally, but it serves as a useful landmark in understanding the layout of the town and its separation from the palace complex.
Versailles was a purpose-built royal town in the 17th century — Louis XIV had the town planned on a grid with three radiating avenues converging on the palace. The Hôtel de Ville sits in what was always the civilian heart of that town: not the court, but the administrative and commercial life that served it. Walking from the palace gates south along the Rue de la Paroisse and then east to the market takes you through this grid, past 18th-century town houses that belonged to ministers, court officials, and the merchants who supplied them.
The town retains this character today. It is an affluent, orderly, well-maintained Île-de-France town, rather formal in atmosphere, with good food shops, a small independent cinema, and the slightly self-contained air of a place that has spent 350 years in the shadow of something much more famous than itself.