[5] After the dissolution of the monasteries the greater part of Rawdon passed to the Crown and shortly thereafter to Henry Clifford, second Earl of Cumberland, who died without issue in 1570.

Col. Charles Payne Barras, agent of the family in the 1860s, founded brick and tile works to use the abundant local clay.

George Rawdon became secretary and agent of Edward, 1st Viscount Conway, and served in Ireland following the Catholic rebellion in Ulster in 1641.

The village of Little London with its extensive conservation area lies in the westernmost part of Rawdon, about 1 mile (1.5 km) south of the centre of Guiseley.

Until the local government reorganisation in 1974 this area was part of a district called Aireborough which was subsequently divided between Leeds and Bradford.

The Bradford designation centres on Lane Head House, built for the steward of Esholt Hall Estate c. 1710–1720, with its associated cottages, and outbuildings and other mainly late 18th century development.

“The ‘old nobility’ may have gone, perhaps for ever, but in their stead has arisen a race of self made nobles, born of trade and commerce, whose pretty villas or castellated towers stud the hillside or nestle in the wood, to the undoubted advantage of the landscape".

A church school for girls and infants was built in Town Street in 1861 and extended in 1876 with two classrooms for boys, together with a master's house.

Woodhouse Grove School was established on an estate purchased by the Wesleyans in 1811 who had the existing house and folly of Robert Elam, a prominent Leeds Quaker, converted and furnished.

Anthony Ibbotson's Seminary, run 1823-1858 by the local minister, the Baptist Ministerial Training College in a Victorian Gothic building on Woodlands Drive which opened in 1859 and closed in the 1970s, and Little London School in Micklefield Lane, built in 1846 in a vernacular Tudor style, which was also used by the Baptists as a Sunday School until their own was built in 1884 and also as a Mechanics Institute until a building in Leeds Road was acquired.

Littlemoor Primary School in quasi-ecclesiastical style with a bell turret opened in 1879 at the junction of Harrogate Road and Batter Lane.

Rawdon is home to St Peter's Church which was built by Francis Layton as a chapel of ease for the parish of Guiseley in 1645.

Due to the troubled times (English Civil War 1642–1651, then Cromwell's Commonwealth until the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660) it took many years to erect the church.