Aston Hall

About this place

There is a hole in the banister of the Great Stairs at Aston Hall that a cannonball made in 1643, and nobody has patched it in nearly four centuries. King Charles I spent a single night here in the autumn of 1642 on his way to Edgehill, the first major battle of the Civil War, and the owner, Sir Thomas Holte, paid for the hospitality the following year when Parliamentary troops besieged the house and bombarded it for three days. You climb the carved oak staircase, run a finger over the damage, and that alone is worth half the ticket. The house went up between 1618 and 1635 to a design credited to John Thorpe, and it is one of the last great Jacobean mansions built in England: red brick with turrets and ogee domes, moulded plaster ceilings, and a Long Gallery on the first floor stretching roughly 41 metres, made for indoor strolling on the kind of wet days that never seem to end here. Rooms are furnished in seventeenth-century style, and the ground-floor kitchens tell the servants' story more honestly than the state rooms do. A lesser-known chapter: James Watt junior, son of the steam-engine pioneer, leased the hall from 1817 until his death in 1848; a private company opened it to the public in 1858, and in 1864 Birmingham Corporation bought it, making it the first historic country house in Britain to pass into municipal ownership as a museum and public park. Now the practical part. The hall opens only Friday to Sunday, 11:00 to 16:00 with last entry at 15:00, shuts completely from early November to mid-February apart from special events, and closes on bank holidays. Adults pay £10, children £5, and a family ticket is £22; the gardens and surrounding park are free. Booking online ahead spares you the queue on weekends and in school holidays. There is no lift: the ground floor suits pushchairs and wheelchairs, but the Long Gallery and upper rooms mean stairs and uneven wooden floors. No cafe operates at present, so bring food and use the picnic area in the gardens. The hall sits a couple of hundred metres from Villa Park, Aston Villa's stadium; on match days the free car park shuts and roads close, so check the fixture list before driving. By train, Aston and Witton stations are each about ten minutes' walk, and eight to ten minutes out of New Street. If you are in Birmingham for a few days it is a pleasant half-day out that pairs genuine history with a park where children can run, but it is not something to break a journey from London for.