In the 16^th century, when East Anglia was the most highly populated region of England, Lavenham paid the 14^th highest amount of tax among towns in the land.  Its wealth came from a cottage industry producing woollen broadcloth that was sold all over England, Europe and even North Africa and Asia. In spite of incursions of foreign products and the ravages of the Black Death, Lavenham’s economy was based on clothmaking for several centuries. Then, in the late 17^th/early 18^th centuries, cloth weaving, once a cottage industry, transferred to large towns with factories, powered first by water and then by steam.

Although some workers were able to use their traditional skills in weaving horsehair, Lavenham, having lost its major source of income, became a quiet agricultural backwater where little changed for a couple of centuries and many buildings, Little Hall included, were left “unimproved”. Lavenham is attractive now because of this absence of change. Impoverished and neglected during the early part of the last century, the village and its houses are now being carefully nurtured and preserved.

Visitors to Little Hall see an ancient building which reflects the history of Lavenham. First built in the 1390s as a family house and workplace for the Causton family, it was enlarged and improved in 1425-50, modernised by the addition of a fireplace and a new upper floor in the Hall in the mid 1500s and given a new rear wing around  1700. Eventually it was divided into six tiny tenements and for nearly two hundred years provided homes for six families.

Little Hall was restored in the 1920s/30s by the Gayer-Anderson twin brothers. Soldiers and talented artists and collectors, they left the house to be a hostel for Art Students under the supervision of their friend, the last private occupant, painter Reginald Brill. The house has since been maintained by the Suffolk Building Preservation Trust as an accredited museum.

The ground floor of the house presents six rooms, mainly Tudor, but containing the furniture and part of the collections of the Gayer Andersons. This gives the house the atmosphere of a home, welcoming and eccentric. The rooms vary from an exotic Persian panelled study to the Dining Room, once the main Hall of the old house, with beams and latticed windows. The two upper rooms include a spectacular chamber with a striking crown-post roof. The garden combines a knot-garden along Tudor lines with a beautiful traditional English garden.