Longden Manor, together with a 260 acre park, was the mid-Victorian creation of Henry de Grey Warter (1807–1884), whose family was first recorded at Cruckmeole, near Hanwood, in 1308. The family was established at a seventeenth-century house at Cruckmeole, rebuilt in classical style in brick in circa 1790, possibly for John Warter, (1745–1821), younger son of Henry Warter (d. 1763) and his wife Mary Evason (d. 1790).

Henry de Grey Warter was John Warter’s grandson. He had trained as a lawyer and built up an estate around the site of Longden Manor, following his inheritance of the Oaks estate on the death of his grandfather John Warter (1745–1821). By the 1870s his landholdings amounted to some 3,453 acres in Shropshire and, as the estate grew to this scale, it clearly cried out for a mansion.

The site chosen was that of a farm called Coppice House, which was first recorded in 1719. The new house was said to have been designed by Warter himself, yet with assistance from Edward Haycock, and was built in 1863–6. Its external elevations were of similar style to Haycock’s Walford Manor (q.v.) and it is likely that the owner’s involvement related to plan and to the chosen style with the executant architect having a strong directional-control over the building. The three-storeyed stone-built house with Grinshill stone dressings was essentially square in plan. It had a triple-gabled, east-facing entrance front, with central oriel window below which an embattled single-storey porch led into the house. To the north were lower service ranges and a clock tower positioned at the north-east corner. Inside, the main rooms were arranged around a central full height, top-lit staircase hall, and had views to the South Shropshire hills.

Yet the building itself was a lumpish architectural exercise of little merit; in spite of first floor oriels and ground floor bay windows on its south front, the gables were too wide and low and the squat chimneys failed to give any animation to the house’s skyline.

Warter served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1879 and married twice, firstly to Harriet, daughter of John Benbow, MP for Dudley, and secondly, in 1875, to Ellen Graham Goddard.

After Warter’s death, he was succeeded at Longden Manor by his surviving daughter from his first marriage, Mary Eliza, who had married Meaburn Smith Tatham in 1860.