Standing in its elevated small park to the south of the north Shropshire town of Market Drayton, a 1960s boundary change brought Pell Wall over the county border from Staffordshire and into Shropshire. As a result, Shropshire has a late masterpiece and swansong of the architect Sir John Soane. The place’s unusual and memorable name is thought to derive from a field name meaning a spring in the hollow.

The property’s history has always, it seems, been one of mixed fortunes. The site was originally a part of Tyrley Heath Farm rather than that of a historic mansion house, and by the late eighteenth century it was a part of the landholdings of Samuel Davies, a Market Drayton banker, who had set about acquiring land around Drayton. In 1820, as Davies faced bankruptcy, his 296 acre property was sold for £5,0057 to Purney Sillitoe (1772–1851), who had married Davies’ daughter Eliza eight years earlier. Sillitoe was a wealthy iron merchant who had been living in London and for whom the opportunity of land acquisition provided the possibility of a rural retirement.

Proposing a cost of £10,000, Sillitoe engaged the ageing Sir John Soane (1753–1837) to create the new house at Pell Wall, meeting the architect in London on the 24th February 1822. What emerged from this meeting was a project which took six years to complete and saw the architect visiting Pell Wall a total of nine times to oversee not only the building of a house, but also the ancillary buildings of stables, gardens and lodges. Individually, these are all of merit, with the main Market Drayton Lodge, on the Hinstock Road conceived on a triangular plan and as an extraordinary combination of classical and gothic motifs.

The project cost the Sillitoes a total of £20,9761 and is important as not only Soane’s last, but also one of the most complete of his country house schemes. The house, as designed, was essentially a rectangular block, with a three-bay north-east facing entrance front.