Strands
Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt and the National Theatre
In Matthew Arnold’s essay on ‘The French Theatre’ (1879) he urges on the movement to found a national theatre and fancifully imagines French comediens departing for London and passing ‘along the Strand… I see a fugitive vision of delicate features under a shower of hair and a cloud of lace, and hear the voice of…
Read MorePanoramas, Dress Circles and Tubes
In 1787 Robert Barker put a patent on a way of seeing: ‘panorama’. It is said that he came upon the term when surveying the city of Edinburgh from the top of Calton Hill. Moving to London, Barker reconstructed 360 degree views in a Leicester Square art gallery; an initiative mimicked by his son on…
Read MoreFord Madox Ford on the Strand in the nineteenth century
The Strand figures twice in Ford Madox Ford’s reminiscences about his pre-Raphaelite relations, Ancient Lights (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911). First in this passage which is revealing about the different experiences of place in different generations: I was talking the other day to a woman of position when she told me that her daughters were…
Read MoreMy name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair!
Vultures waiting for the garden to die: I remember taking this photograph, looking at the crane and the sign advertising office space, and thinking they were like vultures gazing down greedily on the last struggles of the community garden as it faced eviction from the site. Community garden on the Odhams Press site 1979: There was so…
Read MoreBuilding construction and demolition Strand Palace Hotel Foyer 1930 – 31
Few Art Deco buildings were more glamorous than the luxury hotel. In England, Claridges, the Savoy and the brand new Dorchester all had sumptuous Art Deco interiors. But Oliver P. Bernard’s designs for the Strand Palace made this one of the most celebrated hotel interiors in London. Bernard had worked as a set-designer in theatre…
Read MoreExeter ‘Change
Originally submitted by Chris Kenyon Jones A shopping mall – with a zoo upstairs – once occupied what is now the site of the Strand Palace Hotel. The Exeter Exchange (or ‘Exeter ’Change’) was originally built in the late 17th century to house a collection of small shops at ground level. From the 1770s to…
Read MoreThe ebb and flow of the Strand
Submitted by David Green The Strand means the same in English as it does in various other languages – Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, German – even Old Norse and Old English. It’s a place where land and water meet; where things run aground, where things are ‘stranded’ – left when the waters recede. This is true…
Read MoreCount Peter and the Savoy
This week has seen the return to the Strand of a very important figure: Count Peter of Savoy. He’s the gilded figure on the pediment entrance to the Savoy Hotel who looks like a Wagnerian extra on the run. Now resplendently restored and polished, he looks alarmingly like Darth Vader. But it’s good to see…
Read More‘Like a festering wound covered by cloth’: cleaning, cutting and curing the Strand
Today I stumbled across a strand story written by E. Beresford Chancellor in 1927. It is from his ‘Introduction’ to Disappearing London (ed. Geoffrey Holme, London: The Studio Limited, 44, Leicester Square). ‘[T]here is beginning to spring up a generation which remembers, but cannot for the life of it recall, the Strand and its northern purlieus…
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