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The present hall, constructed in 1870, was designed for the Palmer family by E.P. Law of Northampton. It is in an Italianate style with French pavilion roofs. Law was responsible for the design of a number of buildings in the area including the former Rectory on the western side of the village.
The previous hall, built in 1775, was designed by John Johnson of Leicester. This was in the Palladian style and was built at a cost of £7,000. Remnants of the foundations of this hall are still visible in the cellars of the present structure. The cellars are still equipped with the domestic brewing utensils once common in a country house before the turn of the century.
In his ‘History of Northamptonshire’, published in 1761, Bridge states the ‘Sir Jeffrey Palmer, Lord of the Manor, hath here an old mansion-house’, this would indicate that the hall then standing was of some age in 1761 and was rebuilt in 1775. It is likely that this original hall was of timber construction although little information is available.
There was another hall at Carlton, as it was then known, called the West Hall. Little is known about this hall.
Bridge mentions ‘a mansion, now ruined, pertaining to West-hall Manor’ (History of Northamptonshire 1761). It is thought that this ruined mansion was probably located to the rear of the church, although another possible location is nearer to what are now the main gates.
Carlton came to the Palmer family in 1408 through the marriage of William Palmer to Anne, the daughter of Nicholas Warde, the then owner of Carlton.
Geoffrey Palmer, a descendant of William Palmer ‘declined the King’s cause’ and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was appointed Attorney General in 1660 after the Restoration and was created a baronet on 7 June 1660.
In the 1920s the Hall and the park were leased to the Firth family of Sheffield steel fame. It was sold to Stewarts and Lloyd in 1934 and housed the offices of Stewarts and Lloyd when they evacuated them from the danger zone around the steel works. The air raid shelters that serviced the hall still exist although it is said that these were for protecting documents, not the staff!
Immediately after the war it was used as accommodation for management trainees and company guests.