Aston Bury Manor

Aston Bury Manor is a manor house dating to the mid-17th century, with reused heraldic door spandrels from around 1540-45 incorporated into the doorway of the east staircase. The house was originally built for the Cason family and has undergone significant restorations: in 1883 for Captain W E F O'Brien, and again between 1908 and 1909, when Forsyth and Maule were commissioned to carry out repairs. It was later adapted for educational use by Hertfordshire County Council around 1972.

The ground floor walls are constructed of flint, laid in bands with brick and featuring brick dressings. The first floor is timber-framed, with infill panels faced in brick. The roof is steeply pitched and covered in old red tiles. The building consists of a long rectangular main block of two storeys, cellars, and attics, facing north, with two large gabled stair wings at the rear.

Aston Bury Manor is notable for the symmetry of its elevations and the original upper floor layout. The ground floor originally comprised a passage separating the hall on the left-hand side, leading to the main staircase, from a parlour and various service rooms. An elaborate second staircase was also present. The two staircases are a remarkable architectural feature, each approached separately and serving a pair of principal first-floor rooms, with smaller rooms positioned between them. A balustraded grille provided light to the rear rooms from the staircases, designed to eliminate the need to pass through one room to access another. The second floor was originally a long gallery with a plastered waggon ceiling, two fireplaces, gable-end windows, and four dormers, now partitioned into bedrooms.

The symmetrical north front is seven windows wide, featuring alternating shaped gables and hipped dormers behind linking parapets. Four-light mullioned and transomed windows, set in moulded brick surrounds with leaded glazing, illuminate the front. A central gabled porch, constructed around 1908, shelters a square-headed moulded entrance doorway with a moulded oak doorframe. Moulded string courses are present at first-floor and eaves level. The cellar is lit by mullioned windows to the right of the porch. Buttresses are positioned at the corners of the end walls. The end gables have sinuous, double-curved brick coping, and paired ornamental chimney stalks with spurred caps flank the centre of each gable. Lofty ground floor rooms exist, with a lower floor level at the west end containing a former kitchen. This space features a very wide, lintol-surrounded gable fireplace and a blocked four-light, heavy oak, ovolo-moulded window in the rear wall. The east open-well staircase, constructed with a closed string, bi-symmetrical turned balusters, and heavy square newels, rises to attic level and features tall finials on the corner newels, composed of an obelisk on balls raised on an arched pierced base. Acorn finials and an arabesque decorated wooden band are fixed to the string and floor-edge at the landings. The west staircase is of a similar design but with more traditional pierced Jacobean finials.

High walls enclose a small, terraced garden to the rear, containing a four-centred arched gateway on each side.