Hatton Grange is a wonderful set piece. The handsome pedimented Georgian house stands splendidly – like a big dolls’ house – in its own world of an eighteenth-century landscape park, over a mile from busy roads and, it seems, remote from the twenty-first century. The park’s authorship is, at present, a mystery, whilst the house stands as one of the most complete and instructive examples of the architecture of the Shrewsbury architect, Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (1723–1777). It is the sister of the same architect’s Brockhampton Court in Herefordshire but, unlike that house, its Georgian credentials are more or less intact and its attribution is faultless. Hatton’s decorative incarnation, from pediment to chamber chimneypieces, is contained in Pritchard’s Drawing Book. Here, the craftsmen’s names are given, the time and the cost detailed; but it is only since the twentieth-century identification of the Drawing Book that this level of appreciation of Hatton’s architecture has been possible, since many of the family papers associated with the Kenyon-Slaney family have been considered lost.

Plowden Slaney (1724–1788) was the builder of the house, as it now stands, and his great-grandfather, Robert Slaney (bapt. 1623), had acquired the estate in circa 1655. Hatton had, prior to the Dissolution, been a grange of Buildwas Abbey along with the nearby properties of Cosford Grange and Ruckley Grange (q.v.). The estate passed through various hands and, by the seventeenth century, had come to the Greys, scions of the Lords Grey of Powis. As late as 1654, Thomas Grey, his wife Anne and their son and heir Walter were still styled as of Hatton Grange, when they entered into a bargain and sale of a corn mill and paper mill at Ryton to ‘Robert Slaney of Shuffenhall [Shifnal] gent’. Soon after, the estate itself seems to have been acquired by Slaney.

The estate’s principal house is thought to have been originally located at the farm to the west of the present Hatton Grange, at what is now known as Plowden House.