A highly theatrical piece of early nineteenth-century architectural pretensions, more akin to the merchant’s villas to be found on the edges of a city – perhaps unsurprising in view of the architects responsible having been designers of stuccoed villas at Edgbaston, Birmingham.

Essentially a three-bay, two-and-a-half storey building of late eighteenth-century date, Astley was given a stucco coating to affect a rusticated lower storey, with a stout one bay, one storey porch of Greek Doric columns. Pairs of Corinthian pilasters frame the angles and front centre bay, rising through the upper storeys. A balustraded fenestration surmounts the centre bay, whilst the low pitched roof, on each side of the house, is framed as a classical pediment. To the right of the main block – linked by a screen of two segmental arches embracing a central doorway – is a pavilion with a pediment supported by two Greek Doric columns set in antis and flanking a blind niche whilst, on the left, is a handsome conservatory, apparently of late nineteenth-century date.

The Grecian conversion dates to before 1837, when Charles Hulbert wrote of the alterations having been lately executed for John Bishton Minor (1805–1858). Hulbert also gave the architects as Fallows and Hart of Birmingham, a practice also responsible for the neo-Greek Buttermarket and Town Walls Methodist Chapel (now a part of the Girls’ High School) in Shrewsbury. John Fallows exhibited a design for ‘A hunting box erected in Shropshire’ at the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1829, which may have been for Astley. However, the house was described by Hulbert as Minor’s residence and when John Bishton Minor’s daughter Marianne married John Kilvert, the owner of the Grinshill quarries, in 1858, there was no mention of any other residence or seat to imply that Astley was a ‘hunting box’. Minor was a keen sportsman, though, and he became the owner, following the Halston (q.v.) sale of William Webb’s equestrian portrait of John Mytton which thereafter hung at Astley House and was engraved in 1841.

Augustus Henry Minor succeeded to the property and, in 1868, sold the estate to the Shrewsbury brewer, Thomas William Trouncer. His father, another Thomas, had established the brewery in 1807, and in 1845 took on a new site in the suburb of Coleham, where the buildings – now converted to residential use – still remain.