Belvedere House, The Seat of Sir Sampson Gideon Bart.

Published in London 1773 for R. Goadby, J. Towers in Fore Street near Cripplegate.

Size is about 11.3 x 20 cm (4 1/4 x 8 inches)

The word Belvedere means ‘beautiful view’ in Italian. When settlement began on top of hill to the west of Erith the view down towards the River Thames and over it to Essex and beyond must indeed have been very beautiful. The origins of the town owe much to the presence of an ancient estate. The Belvedere estate was first recorded in 1654. Thomas Cawstin, a wheelwright of Welling who owned property in Bexley as well as in Erith, bought two fields called Great and Little Brights, and two houses next to one of them and near the road ‘from the marshes to Lessness Heath’, in a place known as Blinks Hill. By 1689 one of the two houses had been demolished. In the early 1700s Thomas Hayley bought the lease, demolished the second house and built another, although not on the same site. The new house was also mostly demolished in the 1760s, when the last Belvedere house was built. It became home to such luminaries as Sir Sampson Gideon MP (a fabulously wealthy financier), Lord Say and Sele (a leading Whig politician) and Sir Culling Eardley (a religious reformer and philanthropist) before the estate was broken up in 1864 and the house sold to the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society as a seamen’s home. The house was pulled down in 1959.

This original antique print was produced from copper plate engraving process. Note from the picture that edges are torn but the picture itself is still in very good conditon for the age of this print.