Formerly a possession of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, the manor of Hardwick was acquired at the Dissolution by Walter Leveson of Lilleshall (q.v.) whose descendants owned the property until 1765. By 1579–80, the Hardwick Manor was apparently held as a copyhold by Richard Tyler who was succeeded by his daughter Dorothy, the wife of William Whitcombe. The Whitcombes’ grandson, another William, was styled as ‘of Hardwick’ in 1663, but the place had passed out of the family’s hands by 1726 when Edward Grant sold his interest to Edward Appleyard. Following Appleyard’s death, Hardwick was sold by degree of Chancery in 1740 for £2,300 to Charles Baldwyn of Lincoln’s Inn, who made the purchase in trust for John Powys of Shrewsbury. In 1741, though, the property had passed to the Hills who, in 1765, bought the manor of Hardwick outright from the Leveson family’s representative, Earl Gower.

Hardwick was thereafter occupied by Sir Rowland Hill, 1st Bt (1705–1783), who lived there until his death with his second wife, Mary Pole. Lady Hill married a third husband, Joseph Foster Barham (1729–1789) – a Jamaican plantation owner who established a Moravian mission at his Mesopotamia plantation – and she continued to occupy Hardwick Grange until her death in 1790. The house was, in fact, depicted in the background of Lady Hill’s portrait by John Russell of 1778, suggesting that the property was already settled on her at that time. It appears as a five bay, two storey brick block, with painted stone window surrounds, the centre doorway having a segmental pediment whilst, above, the window seems to have a triangular pediment, with a roof pierced by three dormers. To each side is shown an attached two-storeyed block with Venetian windows on the ground floor. A Moses Griffith watercolour of circa 1790, in the collection at Dudmaston, similarly shows this elevation, the outer wings of which possibly represented additions of the 1770s.