In the early twentieth century, Braggington initially suffered from interior asset-stripping, with H.E. Forrest noting the sale of its massive staircase with heraldic-carved newels in 1924, whilst Pevsner thirty years later found the house ‘shockingly neglected’. The house was still present, to be recorded by the Victoria County History in 1968 but was demolished in the decade following. A sad loss and one that is hardly compensated for by the bungalow that serves as a tombstone upon its site.

Braggington, in medieval times, had been the possession of the Corbets of Wattlesborough, and passed to the Burghs before coming to the Leighton family in 1501. With the marriage of Mary, daughter of Sir Thomas Leighton, to Robert Owen (d. 1629) in 1614, Braggington was settled on Owen. He was Sheriff of Shropshire in 1618, a scion of the powerful Shrewsbury family of merchants, whose father Edward was the builder of Owen’s Mansion in Shrewsbury’s High Street. Thrice married, Robert Owen was the father of a total of eighteen children, and was the founder of the Owen line at Woodhouse (q.v.).

His eldest son by his marriage to Mary Leighton, was christened Leighton Owen (d. 1657). Leighton came into Braggington on the death of his father and played a prominent Parliamentarian role in the Civil War, besides being a notable Anabaptist whose widow, Elizabeth (d. 1702) licensed the Hall as a dissenting meeting house in 1691. She inherited a life interest in the property on her husband’s death and it was presumably she and her unmarried son, Thomas Owen (c. 1644–1685), who were responsible for rebuilding the family seat.

Bearing Thomas’s name, the motto ‘GOD IS OUR HOUSE’ and the date 1675 in the broad entablature of its north door, this was a solid provincial Stuart house of English bond brick, with soft red sandstone dressings. The north front was a lofty three storeys and attics, with gabled two-bay projections, flanked a gabled three-bay centre. It was ambitious in its proportions, if not necessarily the height of fashion. Without the gables, this front, with its well-mannered, cross-framed mullioned windows, stone quoins and string courses, would have presented a more classical aspect and, in the gables, having a cornice running across their bases, it is tempting to see them as transitional features on the road to the Palladian pediment.