Greenhithe sits beside the river, in a queer little byway. From it sailed away into the northern ice and an obscure death, Sir John Franklin and his crews of the Arctic expedition, on board the Erebus and Terror, 1845. Many an one must, since then, have reflected upon the peculiarly ominous names of those ships.
Greenhithe is just a quaint, waterside street of houses running parallel with the Thames, with shops of a kind which give you the impression that they are kept by people who never expect to sell anything, and that they, in fact, never do sell anything; that they would resent the very suggestion of a sale, and are a kind of shop-keeping anchorites, who keep shop in fulfilment of vows to deny purchasers the satisfaction of making purchases. Though, I honestly declare, I have never seen any article in Greenhithe shop-windows in the least desirable by any reasonable person. Almost the oldest house in this queerest of queer streets is one which bears the initials and date:
E.
I. M
1693
I believe it must have been only a little later than this period when some of the goods exposed to view in these windows were added to stock.
INGRESS ABBEY.
In the broad reach off Greenhithe and Northfleet are anchored the training-ships Arethusa, Warspite, and Worcester; and at the eastward end of this street, which leads to nowhere in particular, you come suddenly upon the handsome mansion of Ingress Abbey, built about 1834 by Alderman Harmer, then proprietor of the Weekly Dispatch. It was built from the stones of old London Bridge, which had been pulled down two years earlier. Sweetly pretty, almost noble, must the Alderman’s lordly mansion have looked, in its lovely waterside park, rich in noble trees. So, indeed, it does even yet, although the house has been long empty, and although it and the park are about to be abolished for the building of a huge wall-paper manufactory. The entire neighbourhood, in fact, is being thoroughly commercialised, and rendered a fuming, striving horror of machinery and belching factory-chimneys. Enterprising people have even plans for factory-building on that projecting spit of desolation between Greenhithe and Northfleet, known as Swanscombe marshes; while as for Northfleet, that old-time village has become a sprawling place of much squalor.
The chief feature of the long street is the rather striking group formed by the dwellings and the chapel of Huggens’s College, in grounds secluded behind a lofty wall. In the years 1844–7 the amiable John Huggens, a city merchant, founded and endowed this college, as almshouses for the benefit of gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances; and here forty of these collegians, with their wives and one woman relative, reside and enjoy an annuity of £52 apiece, and live, like all pensioners, to the most preposterous and incredible ages, much to the disgust of those in the waiting list. Over the archway leading into the grounds is a statue of the admirable Huggens, seated and habited in a tightly buttoned-up frock-coat. He seems to be seeking inspiration in the skies, and holds a roll of papers in his right hand, while the left appears to be groping in something that resembles a coal-scuttle. The street at this corner is quaintly named—in allusion to Huggens, no doubt—“Samaritan Grove.”
Here we are again on the Dover Road, with modern developments of electric tramways leading on through Rosherville to Gravesend. Let us, as soon as may be, turn off to the left from the dust and the traffic, and seek the waterside at Rosherville Pier. The famous gardens created in the great chalk-pit by the enterprising Jeremiah Rosher, 1830–35, were for many years the scene of Cockney jollity and the wildest of high-jinks; all thought very daring by the early Victorians who indulged in them. “Rosherville, Where to Spend a Happy Day”: that was the legend. You made excursion by steamer from London and indulged in tea and shrimps—“s’rimps” in the Cockney tongue, you comprehend—taken in earwiggy arbours in gardens decorated with plaster statues; and possibly took part in some dancing, later on, under the illuminated trees. These things, considered awfully wild then, we look back upon with disgust for their mingled slowness and vulgarity.
Of late years Rosherville Gardens have had but a precarious existence. Now you find them closed, and then they are reopened for a space, and again they are closed once more. The place that Rosher created outside his moribund gardens—this Rosherville—is a grim and grisly spot, with gaunt, would-be stately stucco-fronted mansions and a vast hotel, empty. A melancholy Parade or Terrace faces the river, and a broad road leads up from it to the Garden entrance, on whose gate-piers are great gilded sphinxes: the whole presenting, even its prime, an awful aspect of Egyptian mysticism, qualified, it is true, by plaster, but still not, you know, ever of a gay and gladsome kind. Children, involuntary partakers of those “Happy Days,” were appalled by these surroundings, and usually howled with dismay at sight of those gate-piers, refusing to be comforted at the explanation that the awful beasts on them were only “spinkses.” Many an unhappy child dreamt horribly afterwards of being pursued by spinks.