BELL HOUSE Bell House, once the Master’s house and then a College boarding house, is a charming
bibles and prayer books for Oxford University, including supplying the American colonies until the American Revolution. He played a diligent role in civic affairs in the City of London and was an alderman for most of his adult life for Candlewick Ward. In 1785 by becoming Lord Mayor of London. In the 1760s the Wrights decided to join the exodus of families from the City, which for the ‘middling sort’ was becoming a place of business and manufacture rather than residency. Dulwich, with its country air and spa at Dulwich Wells, provided an attractive alternative and he built Bell House and its coach house in several acres of farmland. Some of the garden later formed part of Dulwich Park and also Frank Dixon Close. Fields surrounded the property and at the front you can still see the ‘ha-ha’, a sunken wall designed to keep sheep out while being invisible from the house. Thomas Wright was a community- minded man. He installed the house’s eponymous bell to help assemble people for local firefighting and it was used for this purpose over the next century. Thomas Morris described how, when a fire broke
out at the village bakers on Bonfire Night in around 1847, the ‘Fire Bell’ on top of Bell House was rung with all its might. Thomas Wright was a founder of the Dulwich Quarterly Meeting of residents, which turned into a regular dining club at the Greyhound pub and still exists today. He lent his business acumen to many London charities including the City of London Lying-in Hospital and the Middlesex Infirmary and financially supported many more, from the Marine Society to the Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes. Other distinguished residents of Bell House include a draper named Anthony Harding. He recognised that middle-class women were beginning to shop for themselves so he set up Harding, Howell & Co.’s Grand Fashionable Magazine on Pall Mall, selling silks, gloves, jewellery, clocks and ornaments. Opened in 1796, Harding’s can be considered the first department store and is almost certainly a shop Jane Austen would have known: Colonel Brandon hears of Willoughby’s engagement outside a Pall Mall shop in Sense and Sensibility.
Georgian time capsule. Built in 1767, its elegant rooms, tall windows and beautiful gardens have witnessed many changes in the 250 years since it was built. Sharon O’Connor is now researching the history of the house and unearthing fascinating stories of its inhabitants such as Thomas Wright, a warehouse worker who went on to became a successful businessman and the man who built Bell House for his family.
Thomas Wright was born in Holborn in 1722. His father, who died when Thomas was four, was a pastry cook and ‘scavenger’, someone with responsibility for keeping the city’s streets clean. Thomas worked in a paper warehouse on old London Bridge, became an apprentice in the Stationers’ Company and from there built a large business publishing almanacs, bibles and prayer books. He held the monopoly for printing
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