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.
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.”