During the late twentieth century, Priorslee Hall was headquarters of the Telford Development Corporation, the body that determined the use of the land that had been a part of its former estate and, indeed, a good deal beyond it. The house, sadly shorn of its chimney stacks, sits on the edge of the new town, its setting somewhat swamped by modern buildings that, with the Hall, fulfil an institutional use.

The former mansion is an eminently handsome early eighteenth-century red brick house with stone basement, quoins, voussoirs and string courses, and with a central doorcase, that is crowned by a broken segmental pediment upon brackets. This sits at the centre of three recessed bays, which are embraced to each side by projecting two-bay wings. Originally with straight parapets, the main fronts of the house were enlivened in the nineteenth century with the addition of pedimented Dutch gables, in which the attic windows are now set.

The house was built by Edward Jordan, whose father and namesake had hailed from Dunsley in Staffordshire. He married Sarah, daughter and heiress of John Wyke of Priorslee. Jordan was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1720 and it is possible that the decision to build may have been made immediately prior to his term of office. By the mid eighteenth century, Priorslee was the seat of Humphry Pitt (d. 1769), who had married Jordan’s daughter and heiress, Sarah. Pitt had been the owner of a collection of early manuscript ballads, which he gave to the eventual Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811). The gift followed Percy’s discovery of the collection when he realised that the housemaid was about to light the fire with one of them at Pitt’s Shifnal house. Percy later published the manuscripts in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

Priorslee and its estates, in turn, passed to the Pitt’s four daughters and their descendants: Martha, who married Plowden Slaney of Hatton Grange (q.v.) in 1761; Frances, who married William John Yonge, later of Caynton House (q.v.); Maria who married Captain Richard Edwards of the 6th Regiment of Dragoons; and Sarah, who married William Jenks but died leaving a daughter, Elizabeth, who was ward of the Slaneys and who eloped with Henry Beaufoy. A division of the estates, by private act of Parliament, took place in 1800.