Little Barford School

This is a former school building dating to 1872, with a porch added around 1880. It is constructed of gault brick with red sandstone dressings, and has a clay tile roof. The building is L-shaped, consisting of a rectangular schoolroom with a rectangular porch projecting from the west end.

The single-storey schoolroom has a pitched roof with decorative bands of scalloped tiles along the east and west slopes. The walls are laid in Flemish bond, featuring a dogtooth eaves course, red sandstone quoins, a continuous red sandstone sill course, and a chamfered plinth. The gable ends have a red sandstone platband above the windows. The west-facing front elevation, overlooking Barford Road, has two shallow-arched window openings, while the north and south gables each have a single window; all utilize polychromatic gault brick and red sandstone voussoirs, with two casement windows of three vertical lights separated by a central timber mullion. The porch, added around 1880, is a single-storey lean-to with a shallow-arched opening containing a recessed ledged-and-braced timber door and a small casement window to the left. The rear of the porch features a two-over-two casement window. The porch’s design mirrors the earlier schoolroom, incorporating a clay tile roof, dogtooth eaves course, and polychromatic voussoirs. The rear (east) elevation of the schoolroom has a central brick chimneystack, the upper portion of which has been removed.

Inside the porch, there are two rows of numbered coat hooks at child height on the east, west and north walls, along with a hand basin in the south-west corner. The schoolroom has a hammerbeam roof supported by two decorative trusses resting on stone corbels, with exposed rafters, purlins and wall plates. The walls are painted brick, with a wooden picture rail and wooden cladding to dado height. The floor is original wooden floorboards. A pointed archway with a chamfered brick surround and wall cladding to dado height leads from the porch into the schoolroom. The north wall has eight fitted cupboards beneath the windows, and the east wall features a blocked fireplace with a stone surround and a later cast-iron burner from the early 20th century; four cupboards are located to the left of the fireplace.