From Time and Chance by Joan Evans, Chapter 2 page 21 (Longmans published 1943)
"In 1830 it was decided that Thomas Dickinson should move his headquarters and
his home, from Tower Hill to Woolwich. He secured a lease of a pleasant house
called Bramblebury from the Cloth-workers’ Company. It had been built some
thirty years earlier as a neat three-storied box of a house, with a little
pavilion on either side, in an unpretentious yet formal style. It had a good
dining-room and library, and a double drawing-room symmetrically disposed on
either side of a hall with an open staircase with turned balusters, and any
number of decent bedrooms above. It stood on rising ground at the end of a long
drive, with a great chestnut at the entrance, and from the drawing-room there
was a lovely view, framed in trees, over a Thames gay with sailing ships to the
wide skies and low hills beyond. The Garden boasted fine cedars, and gravelled
paths wide enough for conversation; there were a couple of meadows, and a
neglected and picturesque wood, the joy of children and sketchers.
| Bramblebury today |