The rapidly growing suburb of Shortlands--the birthplace of the historian George Grote--connects Beckenham with Bromley, and in touch with it are several noted mansions, including the Georgian Langley House, Eden Lodge, named after the first Lord Auckland, who lived in it for many years, and was often visited by William Pitt, and the eighteenth-century Kelsey House, on the site of an earlier residence that is often referred to in the records of the reigns of Henry III. and his successors. {131} CHAPTER VI OUTLYING LONDON IN NORTH-EAST SURREY [Sidenote: Dulwich] Of the many villages of Northern Surrey that have during the last half-century been converted into popular suburbs of London, few have had a more interesting history than Dulwich, which has, moreover, in spite of all the changes that have taken place in it and its surroundings, retained something of the sylvan character that distinguished it when it was a mere outlying forest hamlet of the monastery of Bermondsey. On the dissolution of the religious houses the manor of Dulwich was given by Henry VIII. to Thomas Calton, from whose descendants it was bought in 1606 by the famous actor and Lord Mayor of London, Edward Alleyn, who on his retirement from the stage took up his residence in the ancient mansion belonging to it, from which he watched the rising up of the 'Chappell, Schoole House and Almshouses' that formed the nucleus of the celebrated college founded by him, to which he gave the beautiful name of God's Gift.