Condover Hall

Condover Hall is an elegant Grade I listed three-story Elizabethan sandstone building, described as the grandest manor house in Shropshire, standing in a conservation area on the outskirts of Condover village, Shropshire, England, four miles south of the county town of Shrewsbury.

A Royal manor in Anglo Saxon times, until the 16th century Condover Manor was in and out of Crown Tenure. In 1586 it was purchased by Thomas Owen, a Member of Parliament for and Recorder of Shrewsbury, from the family of the previous owner, Henry Vynar, a London merchant who had died in 1585. Owen had had a lease of the manor from 1578, and been in lawsuit with the family.

For over sixty years since 1946 the Hall had been run as a residential school, initially for blind children when owned by the RNIB and latterly under private ownership as a school for autistic children, covering boy boarders and coeducational day pupils. The school and college both closed during 2009.

Owen died in 1598 before the new Hall was completed and its designer remains a matter of debate. Building accounts record that a John Richmond of Acton Reynald was the original master mason, but by 1591 Walter Hancock had taken over the position. Lawrence Shipway, the builder of the second (not current) Shire Hall at Stafford also appears to have had some major contribution to the building design. The most compelling evidence can be found in drawings in the Sir John Soane's Museum that seems to prove that the Hall was designed by the influential Elizabethan architect John Thorpe in the early 1590s.

Built out of pink sandstone, quarried at nearby Berriewood, Condover Hall has the typical Elizabethan two-storey high ground floor rooms lit by tall windows with their regular mullions and double transoms. There are fine chimneys, gables and a good example of a strapwork frieze. The grounds are laid out in formal 17th century style with boxed yew hedges and sandstone balustraded terraces decorated with Italianate terracotta vases. Near the Cound Brook there is an amusing flagstaff held by a sandstone gnome.

...
Wikipedia