Summary
The former seat of the Grove family stands on a moated site at a discreet distance from the main Kidderminster to Bridgnorth road. Before the Dissolution, Jones Grove held a capital messuage of the Abbot of Shrewsbury here, which Blakeway suggested may have been Pool Hall. Certainly the Groves were seated at Pool in the seventeenth century, when Jones’ grandson, John Grove, Town Clerk of London endowed a Free School at Alveley in 1616 and also established alms houses. The three gables on the north front, at the rear of Pool Hall, survive from this period as well as the ramped staircase, with pointed finial-surmounted newels and turned balusters.
The main front of the house, however, faces to the south where it is framed by outbuilt chimney breasts to the sides, which rise above the roofline as panelled brick stacks. The façade is an urbane, early eighteenth-century, brick elevation of five bays and three storeys, bound by stone quoins and with stone voussoirs above each sash window. The entrance to the house is via a handsome balustrade-surmounted two-storey central stone porch. Its ground floor is embraced by Roman Doric pilasters, whilst the central first-floor window is within an eared surround.
The whole façade is framed by tall, stone, gate piers and presents an architectural set piece not unlike Abbey House in Shrewsbury which is of circa 1725. Pool is probably also of this date and may have been rebuilt by James Grove (1652–1734), Serjeant-at-Law 1705, who had married Anne Grey, the sister and co-heir of Thomas 2nd Earl of Stamford from nearby Enville Hall in Staffordshire. Their son, Grey Jones Grove, was Sheriff of Shropshire in 1731 and MP for Bridgnorth 1734, and he married Penelope, daughter and co-heir of Thomas, Lord Jermyn. It is, therefore, possible that the rebuilding was the work of the ageing father and an ambitious son.
The property had been inherited by a great-granddaughter of the Sheriff by 1831, Miss Troth Grove, who married Rev. Richard Jenkins DD, Warden of Balliol College, Oxford. It was tenanted as a farmhouse for much of the nineteenth century, being noticeable by absence of any mention in the thoroughly panopticon Mate’s guide of 1906.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 527 - 528Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021