The Dell is a house in Grays, Thurrock, Essex, built in concrete—one of the earliest houses in Britain to be built in this material. It was built on the instructions of Alfred Russel Wallace, who lived in Grays from 1872 until 1876. Construction Wallace was living in Barking in 1871, but did not like the area. He leased of land in Grays that included an old chalk pit. He decided to build a house on this land to his own specification. There was a nearby cement works and a supply of gravel on the site, so he chose to build the house in concrete. He employed Thomas Robjohns Wonnacott of Farnham as his architect because he had experience in this new material. The grounds were laid out by Wallace himself. They included a serpentine drive from the road now known as Dell Road, (College Avenue did not exist when the house was built). He described the grounds as "a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid imitation of a Welsh valley". Wallace earned the money to pay for the Dell from the natural history collections he made while in south-east Asia. The house There is a plan of the ground floor of the Dell in the Natural History Museum. This was drawn and annotated by Wallace himself. It may be a draft of the final plans, which were prepared by Wonnacott. The Natural History Museum also has a front view of the house in black ink on waxed linen, coloured with blue and brown inks. This too was possibly drawn by Wallace, although it is unsigned. It shows a grand entrance porch to a house with three levels and a fourth-level attic room. There are three chimneys on the main house and a one-storey wing extending to the right. The house overlooked the Thames and on the ground floor there was a large dining room, a library or drawing room, a breakfast room, a veranda, and a kitchen. It was connected to the local gas supply and collected rainwater, although this supplied only the sink and lavatory. Life at the Dell Wallace expected to settle in Grays and live in his new home for the rest of his life. Over the next four years he wrote and published a number of articles and scientific papers, particularly the two volumes of The Geographical Distribution of Animals. In