Meole Brace Hall is situated in what is now effectively a suburb of Shrewsbury but which, in the nineteenth century, was a separate village watered by the Rea Brook. A castle, which is said to have provided accommodation to Prince Arthur on his way to Ludlow, was located here and this was sold by John, Lord Zouche, in the sixteenth century to his tenant Arthur Mackworth. The Mackworth family sold on their Meole property to Thomas Edwardes (d. 1634) in 1597. The castle remained until its destruction by fire at the end of the seventeenth century. Its site, in the gardens of the present house, was marked by a mulberry tree.

Thomas Edwardes, High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1622, married Anne Baskerville and was ultimately succeeded by his third son and namesake. The younger Thomas Edwardes was also High Sheriff of Shropshire – in 1644 – and was created a baronet by Charles I in return for essential funds for the Royalist cause in the Civil Wars. He married, firstly, Mary Norton (d. 1641) and, as his second wife, Cecily Brooke, a scion of the Madeley Court family. He acquired the Greete estate (see Netley, q.v.) in 1639, whilst Meole Brace remained with his heirs until 1779 when it was sold by Hester, the only child of Sir Francis Edwardes, 4th Bt.

The late eighteenth-century purchaser was John Bather (1726–1810), a successful carrier and descendant of a family that had lived at Great Ness at the turn of the eighteenth century and who was resident at The Bank (now Bank Farm). The Bather name occurs in Thomas Farnolls Pritchard’s design book, he having designed a chimneypiece for their property in Mardol, Shrewsbury and also more portable furniture embellishments which might have been for The Bank. It seems unlikely that Pritchard was responsible for work at Meole Brace Hall, since he had died in 1777, and so the house must be the work of one of his followers – perhaps Samuel Scoltock, William Haycock or Joseph Bromfield. The Hall is a south-east facing, red brick block of three bays and two-and-a-half-storeys surmounted by a dentil cornice. The ground floor windows, to each side of the front door, were originally both of tripartite form below a segmental arch containing fanned stucco decoration.