In 1802 the site of Hinstock Hall had been a farm on a property that had looked to the Corbets of Adderley (q.v.) as its overlords. The house was built for Henry Justice, whose family had owned land in the area since the seventeenth century, but who purchased the site of the Hall in 1833. This acquisition and the date of 1835 on the stable block’s weather vane suggest the date of the building of the house itself. Italianate in style, with a hipped roof and broad eaves, Hinstock Hall was of seven bays and two storeys, with a central pedimented doorway. After Henry Justice’s death, the Hall and 544 acres of land were offered for sale by his son in 1862.

Besides details of the dining room, library and ‘folding drawing rooms’ (presumably a suite of drawing rooms with folding doors between), the sale particulars also mention that the, ‘...pleasure grounds, Drives and Walks were skilfully and very tastefully laid out by the eminent landscape gardener, Mr Gilpin, of Brighton…’, this being W.S. Gilpin who also worked at Hawkstone (q.v.).

The purchaser, for the sum of £42,270, was Henry Williams, a Handsworth ironmaster, whose son Philip added a library and billiard room in a wing to the left of the main front. Philip Williams also had a keen interest in astronomy which accounted for the addition of an observatory, the large rooftop dome of which is visible in photographs of the house. On his death in 1895, at the age of fifty-seven, he left the property to his widow for the duration of her life. Thereafter, he disinherited his eldest son on account of his choice of wife, stipulating in his will that the offending lady was forbidden to reside on any of his Shropshire estates.

His second son, Philip Victor (1869–1954), who in 1909 married the presumably more socially acceptable Lady Jaqueta Northcote (1882–1962), sister of the 3rd Earl of Iddesleigh, succeeded. During the Second World War the house provided accommodation for the officers of the Fleet Air Arm’s Blind Flying Establishment, with the family moving to the library and billiard room wing. The younger Philip had continued to acquire land to enlarge the property which at its peak in 1920, totalled 944 acres. In view of the economic downturn of that decade, though, sales of outlying portions of property followed.