The Banastres came over with the Normans. Robert de Banastre built a motte-and-bailey castle at Prestatyn around 1164 and fled to Cheshire and Lancashire in 1167 after Owain Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, destroyed the castle. In 1315 Sir Adam Banastre led the Banastre Rebellion against Thomas, the second Earl of Lancaster, and was summarily beheaded at Charnock Richard when the rebellion failed; another small Lancashire family story of ambition that ended too soon. By 1608 the family had built the first phase of the present house at Bretherton: brick-built, three storeys, Dutch gables, a square central tower on the south front. The original brickwork is still visible in a diaper, or lozenge, flushwork pattern on one gable, dark patterns that the Banastres' masons left for us to find four centuries later.

George Anthony Legh Keck moved to Bank Hall from Leicestershire when he inherited in the 1820s. He was the last person who actually lived in the house, and he commissioned the Kendal architect George Webster to enlarge it in 1832-33. Legh Keck was a collector of stuffed animals, horns from creatures around the world, and classical statuettes; he also owned casts of figures by the sculptor Antonio Canova. Webster's additions matched the older brickwork with care, but you can see the seam where they meet, a sharper detail and a slightly different colour. After Legh Keck died in 1860 the contents were auctioned, the estate passed to the Baron Lilford branch of the family in Northamptonshire, and Bank Hall became a holiday house, then a wartime control centre for the Royal Engineers, then an estate office, then by 1972 an empty building.

What saved Bank Hall was not the lottery and not the developers. It was the volunteers. The Bank Hall Action Group, formed in 1995 and renamed Friends of Bank Hall in 2012, started by raising public awareness, clearing the overgrown grounds, holding open days. In 2003 they got the building onto the first series of the BBC's Restoration where it came second in the voting. In 2007 the snowdrops they had uncovered six years earlier brought visits from the UK Snowdrop Society. In 2002 they funded the first emergency repairs to the cracked west wing with English Heritage. In 2006 an attic water tank crashed through the floors of the oldest part of the building, destroying ceilings and rooms below, and the group kept going. Without them the building would not have existed in a state worth saving when the money finally arrived.

Eighteen acres of gardens, parkland, and arboretum surround the house. George Anthony Legh Keck planted most of it: coast redwoods, a dawn redwood, a Lebanon cedar, an atlas cedar, swamp cypress, lime, magnolia. The tallest tree is a wellingtonia that towers over the woodland. The oldest tree, a 550-year-old yew, predates the present house by a century and a half. The walled garden built in 1835 has a greenhouse and potting sheds along its north wall, and a cricket pitch and tennis lawns once lay beyond a ha-ha, accessed through a yew tunnel. What the gardens are now best known for, though, is February. Carpets of snowdrops cover much of the grounds, uncovered in 2001 when the action group cleared a small area; they have drawn thousands of visitors every winter since, and they are the single thing that turned Bank Hall from a heritage problem into a place worth driving to.

The Heritage Lottery Fund put up £1.69 million in February 2012. The developer Next Big Thing took on the conversion in July 2017 with the aim of finishing in eighteen months. The pandemic delayed everything. The house's exterior was finally restored in 2020, the interiors and immediate gardens completed in 2021, and the Prospect Tower exhibition opened to the public in February 2022, telling the story of the building's near-loss through items pulled from its years of dereliction. The hall is now apartments, the gardens remain open, and the Friends of Bank Hall continue to work on the walled garden and the wider grounds. Carr House, built in 1613 near the estate, was the home of Jeremiah Horrocks, the first person to predict and observe the Transit of Venus, in 1639. Even the small histories at Bank Hall reach further than they first appear.