A property of Shrewsbury Abbey until the Dissolution, Albrighton was purchased, in 1543, by Thomas Ireland, a wealthy Shrewsbury wool merchant, whose younger brother, Robert, was responsible for the imposing half-timbered Ireland’s Mansion on Shrewsbury’s High Street. The present house at Albrighton is said to have been built by Thomas’s grandson and namesake who was Sheriff of Shropshire in 1632. A Royalist in the Civil Wars, he was compounded for his loyalty to the King for £716.

Albrighton is a heavy house, of red and blue diaper brick. It is six bays long, having a sundial upon its south-west corner, with a dormer-punctuated roof, crowned by tall stacks of linked brick chimney-shafts.

After five generations, Thomas Pershall Ireland left only a natural daughter, Mary, and with her demise – an unmarried minor – the property passed to the Crown. Charles Hulbert in 1837 commented on the difficulty of the Estate’s succession, describing Albrighton as ‘so long neglected, and uncertain as to its legal proprietors’.

By that date, though, the nephew of Thomas Pershall Ireland had been granted Albrighton, which he sold, in 1804, to the Rev. Inigo William Jones. The Reverend was preparing to sell the property to one Hugh Smith at the time of his death in 1809, but had not completed the sale. He left an infant son and namesake and, when Inigo William Jones junior eventually came of age, in 1830, Albrighton was sold to a Birmingham solicitor, William Spurrier (d. 1848). Spurrier took a keen interest in his Shropshire estate and, in 1837, Charles Hulbert noted that he had: ‘completely repaired the premises, and added most extensive improvements throughout his lordship; thereby entirely changing the character and appearance of the little parish of Albrighton’. He may have been responsible for the planting of the Shrewsbury road as an avenue, and for the erection of twin cottages flanking the road to appear as if lodges.