Ingress Abbey

The Ingress Estate was a manor in the hamlet of Greenhithe. In 1363, the manor was endowed upon the Priory Abbess in Dartford, Kent, by Edward III (1307–1377). The priory of Dartford was the only house of Dominican nuns in England. The sisterhood was placed under the care of the Friars Preachers of King's Langley, Hertfordshire, and a community of sisters commenced religious observance at Dartford in 1356 under the friars already there. The original intention of the founder, Edward II, was to establish a convent of forty nuns, which with the sixty friars of King's Langley would make up the hundred religious he contemplated when he founded the friary of King's Langley, but it is doubtful…

In 1831, a wealthy solicitor named James Harmer purchased the land, and in 1833 built his Elizabethan-style mansion, which he called Ingress Abbey, on the banks of the Thames. He provided his architect, Charles Moreing, with £120,000 for the construction of follies, grottoes, and hermit's caves. Some of the stone from the Old London Bridge was used in building Ingress Abbey. Harmer served as a model for Jaggers, the Charles Dickens character from Great Expectations, and in the mid-1800s he also owned the Weekly Dispatch to which the poet Eliza Cook was a longterm contributor, living and writing some of her works at Ingress Abbey. In the 1880s, the Shah of Persia sailed up the Thames and…