Yeaton Peverey is a remarkable late nineteenth-century creation of new house, new park and new estate. To compare the Ordnance Survey maps of the house’s site in 1881 and then in 1903 is to see the most extraordinary transformation of enclosed agricultural fields into open parkland and, at their heart, a new mansion. Yeaton is a distinguished mansion, too, being the only complete house to be designed by Sir Aston Webb, an architect who is today best known for the Edwardian façade of Buckingham Palace. Its parklands are also the work of a well-regarded designer, Henry Ernest Milner, in whose 1890 publication, The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening, they feature prominently.

The Wakeman family were the patrons behind the creation of Yeaton Peverey. They were a Worcestershire family who had initially acquired Shropshire links and estates, at Hinton and Rorrington in the south-west of the county. These properties had come to them as a result of the second marriage of Sir Henry Wakeman, 1st Bt (1753–1831, created a baronet 1828). His wife, Sarah, was the daughter and eventual heiress of Richard Ward Offley of Hinton Hall near Pontesbury. The distinctive Offley surname was thereafter perpetuated by being bestowed as a forename upon a number of family-heads including the first baronet’s grandson who was the builder of Yeaton Peverey. Sir Henry Wakeman was the son of Thomas Wakeman, Mayor of Worcester in 1761, and, having distinguished himself as a member of the Honourable East India Company, he established his family at Perdiswell to the immediate north of Worcester, where George Byfield designed a new classical house for the family in 1787–8.

Sir Henry’s elder son, Offley Penbury Wakeman (1799–1858) succeeded him as second baronet, whilst his younger son, Edward Ward Wakeman (1801–1855), was established at Coton Hall, near Bridgnorth (q.v.). As the nineteenth century progressed, though, so too did the city of Worcester and the amenity value of Perdiswell was considered by the family to be diminishing. It was the second baronet’s son and successor, Sir Offley Wakeman, 3rd Bt (1850–1929), who made the decision to sell Perdiswell, in 1875, and to establish the family in Shropshire on a permanent basis.