Layer Marney Tower is a Tudor palace, composed of buildings, gardens and parkland, dating from 1520 situated in Layer Marney, Essex, England, between Colchester and Maldon. The building was designated Grade I listed in 1952.
Constructed in the first half of the reign of Henry VIII, Layer Marney Tower is in many ways the apotheosis of the Tudor gatehouse, and is the tallest example in Britain. It is contemporaneous with East Barsham Manor and Sutton Place, Surrey, with which latter building it shares the rare combination of brick and terracotta construction. The building is principally the creation of Henry 1st Lord Marney, who died in 1523, and his son John, who continued the building work but died just two years later, leaving no male heirs to continue the family line or the construction. What was completed was the main range measuring some three hundred feet long, the principal gatehouse that is about eighty feet tall, an array of outbuildings, and a new church.
The buildings suffered considerable damage from the Great English earthquake of 1884, and a subsequent report in The Builder magazine described the state of the house as such that ?the outlay needed to restore the towers to anything like a sound and habitable condition would be so large that the chance of the work ever being done appears remote indeed?. The repairs were begun by brother and sister Alfred and Kezia Peache, who re-floored and re-roofed the gatehouse, as well as creating the garden to the south of the Tower.