The Manor House and outbuildings, game larder and ha-ha, Little Barford

The Manor House is a multi-phase country house remodelled around 1870, the work attributed to architect John Usher.

Materials

The walls are built chiefly of gault brick with stone dressings, and the roofs are covered in plain tiles. Some areas use red brick, and small sections of the roof are covered in Welsh slate.

Plan

The higher-status rooms are grouped at the south end of the house, with service areas at the north end. All rooms are arranged around a long spinal corridor.

Exterior

The principal elevation faces east and extends for twelve bays. At the left are three bays with a central entrance porch, which is castellated and displays the arms of the Alington family. The next three bays project forward beneath gabled roofs of varying widths, with the right-hand bay extending further forward than the others. At ground floor, the left-hand side of these projecting bays is canted and rises through large slabs of limestone to form a moulded, mitred corner. Further right are two single-storey bays beneath a pyramidal roof (historically the kitchen). Adjoining this is a gabled cross-wing with a ground floor entrance and a first-floor wooden oriel window. This cross-wing forms one side of a horseshoe-shaped service yard, which once featured a covered walkway or pentice but is now missing its roof. The right-hand side of the service yard is a single-storey range with a slate roof forming the north end of the building. It has a pair of wooden double doors on its south elevation.

The north elevation is three bays wide and a single storey high, comprising the terminal range of the service yard. It is walled in red brick laid in Flemish bond and has a roof covered in Welsh slate. There is a single opening to the right of centre: a wooden hatch at window height.

The west elevation faces across an open expanse towards the Church of St Denys and is twelve bays long. At the left, for one bay only, is the sole single-storey element of this elevation: the red-brick wall of the terminal range of the service yard, with a doorway and two windows. The red brick continues to form the ground floor of the adjoining two bays, with gault brick above. The upper floor has three windows, with a central dormer. The next three bays are taller and also show differences in the brickwork between ground and first floors. There are two (partly rebuilt) dormers, and at ground floor there is a doorway beneath a segmental brick arch. The next two bays are higher again than those to their left and have two roof dormers. At ground floor level on the right-hand side, a small projection extends outward to the level of the two gabled bays alongside. These have a castellated bay window at ground floor running across both bays. The final two bays of the building stand further forward and have a single window at ground floor, with two large dormers at first floor.

The south elevation is three gabled bays wide, with the left-hand gable standing slightly further back than the other two. The left gable has a canted bay window at ground floor with a castellated parapet. The right-hand gable has a chimney stack rising through its centre. On the left of the chimney, running across to the middle bay at ground floor, the remains of a weather detail combined with some pale brickwork and a surviving patch of tiled flooring indicate the location of a lost verandah.

The exterior is characterised by considerable architectural variety within a broad Gothic vocabulary, consistent with Usher's distinctive body of work. Features of note include the carved details of the bargeboards around the gables, the variety of window openings (some wooden, some brick, some narrow, some wide, some cruciform), and the attention paid to chimneys. Some chimneys rise directly from the first floors, a small number have elaborate Gothic terracotta designs, while others have been rebuilt at the upper stages.

Interior

The principal entrance leads through a porch with a tiled floor into an open stair hall that connects to the long spinal corridor around which the whole building is organised. Near the stair hall, along the corridor, a door covered in green baize marks a division between the high-status areas of the house (intended for use by the owners and their guests) and the working areas of the building beyond it.

The only room directly accessed from the ground floor of the stair hall was, historically, the library. This adjoined a boudoir which neighboured a drawing room. There was a dining room on the west side of the corridor and a billiard room on the east side. The layout of these rooms remains part of the plan form. Many retain historic features such as cornices, skirting boards, picture rails, fireplaces and shutters, though the extent of survival of these features varies. The billiard room connects directly to a gun room with its gun rack intact.

The working areas of the ground floor, beyond the green baize door, are characterised by more hard-wearing fittings including a flagstone floor running through the spinal corridor. The butler's pantry, housekeeper's room, butler's bedroom, dairy and larder run along the west side of the corridor; the gun room, pantry, kitchen and scullery occupy the east side. The butler's pantry contains a fine Gothic Revival fireplace and connects to a strong room originally for silverware. The dairy has stone floors and large slate shelves. There are meat hooks in the larder. There are shelves and cupboards of a hard-wearing quality in most of these areas. The kitchen has an airy pyramidal roof with a louvred vent at its apex. A large fireplace survives at the south end. The wall it shares with the spinal corridor features a serving hatch with foldable shelves fixed to the corridor wall to allow food to be placed for service. The scullery retains its copper boiler and cast iron range. At the end of the corridor, beyond a 19th-century servants' water closet, is the servants' hall which has a large fireplace (the grate has been removed) and fitted cupboards with some recycled joinery features. In the same room there are sliding horizontal window shutters. Attached to the end of the servants' hall, but accessed from outside, is a single-storey range with a coal shed at the east end (later used as an oil store), a former boiler shed in the middle (not inspected), and a water closet at the west end accessed externally (not inspected).

The first floor contains a great many bedrooms, at least one of which was historically used as a dressing room and another as a schoolroom for the children of the house. They contain a variety of surviving historic features, including fireplaces from the 1870s through to the 1930s or 1940s, bell pushes for summoning servants, skirting boards, cornices, architraves and doors (some four-panelled, some six-panelled, and a small number of very high-quality hardwood doors of around 1800). The upper landing, accessed through an archway at the top of the stair hall, is naturally lit by a large roof lantern. There are a number of water closets and bathrooms at first floor that retain historic sanitary ware from the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Close to the attic stair is a large linen store with seven cupboards, near to the housemaid's parlour.

The first floor displays evidence of the building's phased evolution from the earlier rectory. The clearest evidence lies around the large arcaded circulation space north of the stair hall. This substantial arcade of four-centred arches is an architectural feature of the building today, but is likely to be a structural wall that originated as part of the rectory. The landing east of the arcade, leading to the housemaid's parlour, also contains a large curving buttress. These features, the idiosyncratic plan form of the southern end of the building, and the changing ceiling heights of the southern bedrooms all indicate that the manor house retains structural elements of the earlier rectory.

The attic is six bays in length and contains bedrooms historically used by servants, as well as a store cupboard and a water tank. Historic fittings such as fireplaces, doors and wardrobes survive, as does original wallpaper imitating green tiles.

The cellars are brick-built with some timber posts. The brickwork is predominantly gault brick, though there are some sections of red brick that suggest the cellars may have originated as part of the older rectory. One long arm of the cellar leads to a blocked window and sealed light-well on the east side of the building.

The Game Larder

A detached game larder stands a few metres east of the kitchen and pantry. It is a small single-storey rectangular structure formed of a gault brick plinth laid in Flemish bond, ventilated timber walls (unglazed, with mesh coverings), and a hipped roof covered in Welsh slate with a louvred ridge. There is a partition with a doorway at the centre of the larder dividing two principal areas: the north side provided the hanging space with numerous hooks; the south side has slate shelves used for selecting birds for hanging and preparing carcasses for the kitchen. The floors on both sides are tiled, though many tiles have been lost, and the timber partitions are formed of matchboard panels.

The Ha-Ha

A ha-ha of part-stone and part-brick construction runs from the church path at the north-west of the house in an arc around to the former carriage drive at the south-east. A curving boundary separating the gardens of the former rectory from adjacent pasture is indicated on the 1840 tithe map and could indicate the existence of a ha-ha at that time, though its course does not directly correspond to the structure in place today. Roughly 70 metres of wall at the north-western end is built of uncoursed rubble sandstone and ironstone, with some dressed stone elements that may have been recycled from an earlier structure. Beyond this, the wall is built of gault brick laid in monk bond. The brick wall has in parts an additional skin of mid-20th-century London Brick Company flettons laid in English bond. At the time of inspection (2022), the highest parts of the ha-ha were around 1.2 metres, though closer to the south-eastern terminus the wall was largely concealed by in-fill.