The Culmington Manor estate comprises land that was formerly owned by the Earls of Stafford. When they sold up their Corvedale estates in 1770, the Culmington portion was acquired by a Manchester cotton merchant Gideon Bickerdike (d. 1810) who, in 1768, had also purchased property locally at Seifton and Medley Park. On Bickerdike’s death, his Shropshire estates were inherited by his nephew, Benjamin Flounders (1768–1846), a Quaker industrialist with linen and shipbuilding interests who was also a founding director of the Stockton to Darlington Railway. Flounder’s lasting legacy on his Shropshire properties is the folly tower, known as Flounders Folly, designed by Edward Blakeway Smith and built in 1838.

The estate later passed, by 1851, to George Wood (1794–1864), who also owned property at Hanger Lane, Ealing, Middlesex. During his lifetime, his son Edward was resident in the 1860s as a tenant at nearby Delbury (q.v.). Yet, during his father’s lifetime, Edward Wood had built the core of the present house in 1856. In its first incarnation, Culmington was an asymmetrical vision of polychrome brickwork and steep pitched tiled roofs. There was a tower with prominent pointed roof at the angles of the wings that made up the entrance front.

In 1874 Edward Wood made the decision to base his family in Shropshire and so Culmington Manor was further altered and enlarged – almost out of recognition – in 1882 by the architect Robert Willey. This entailed a re-sashing, with large plate glass sashes, and a large full height canted bay on the garden side-elevation of the house, with the polychrome detailing of the house tamed. The architect responsible, Willey, was from Ealing and had been assisting the Wood family – who then still owned Hanger Hill House, Ealing, and about 900 acres in Ealing and Acton. This West London estate had been a family property since the late eighteenth century but, by the late nineteenth century, it was ripe for residential development which Willey oversaw. Many of the newly laid out roads were named after the family’s Shropshire estate. The family retained the freehold of the Ealing estate properties until 1906 when they were sold to the Prudential following Edward Wood’s death in 1904.

In 1900, Captain Gordon Edward Boileau Wood (b. 1866), the eldest son of Edward Wood of Culmington, was killed at Welkevreden, where he had gone to fight with the Shropshire Yeomanry.