Places
London History Day 2019
Greening Aldwych: A walking tour of lost and future green spaces of Aldwych 31 May 2019 12:30pm – 2:00pm Free! Booking required (link opens Eventbrite booking page). Join the Strandlines editorial team, researchers and archivists at King’s College London, on a tour of past, present, and future green space around Aldwych. We are marking London…
Read MoreLayers of the Strand
Today, I have been time travelling. I explored the farm around Trafalgar Square. I squeezed into a tiny top room in Devereaux Court to hear Isaac Newton speak. I paid a ferryman tuppence to take me to the floating coffee house on the Thames to look over the water at Somerset House. This is all…
Read MoreA Quixotic Ramble along the Strand
The Knight of the Woeful Countenance in the Street of the Sagging Purpose: A Quixotic Ramble along the Strand[1] by Charles Lock Professor of English Literature, University of Copenhagen On Strand Green was a windmill…[2] For Clare Brant A strand is both a thread and a margin, an agent of binding and…
Read MoreSearching for ‘green’
The Northbank Bid have collaborated with Groundwork and King’s College London scientists to suggest ‘Green Walks’ around the Strand area. You can download the map with suggested loops and routes from the Northbank website. The idea is to help Londoners and tourists to avoid the most polluted streets as they travel from A to B:…
Read MoreLife (and Death) beneath the Virtual Strand
Since its retirement from public service in 1994 Aldwych tube station (née Strand) has been busily pursuing a second career in showbusiness. Scoring a part in The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ video (1996) before going on to star in films like V for Vendetta (2005), Atonement (2007) and Fast and Furious 6 (2013), it’s also broken into…
Read More‘that Strand which is lost as Atlantis’: Arthur Machen’s memories of the Strand
Mystic, theatre critic, teller of weird tales and tramper of London’s obscurer byways and thoroughfares, Arthur Machen was also very fond of the Strand. Available through the Internet Archive (courtesy of the University of California libraries) his memoir of the 1870 and 1880s, Far Off Things (Martin & Secker, 1922) recounts ‘the first time I saw the Strand, and…
Read MoreGöttingen and the Strand: Publishers and Princes
What connects Somerset House and King’s College London in the Strand with the University of Göttingen in Germany? The answer, it turns out, is a combination of the Royal House of Hanover and the movements of an enterprising eighteenth-century Dutch publisher. The current Somerset House was begun in 1776 in the reign and under the…
Read MoreThe All-New Watch House
The scaffolding has recently come down from around the Old Watch House in Strand Lane, after a five-month restoration project sponsored by King’s College London and carried out by PAYE Conservation . It has been completely re-rendered, the zinc sheathing of the penthouse storey has been replaced, and the zinc, woodwork and wrought iron of the balcony…
Read MoreMrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse
In the 1720s, Mrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse (a warehouse was a sort of 18th-century department store) in the Strand opposite Exeter Change. According to the trade card that William Hogarth engraved for her, she stocked ‘all sort of Italian silks as Lustrings, Sattins, Padesois, Velvets, Damasks, &c, Fans, Leghorne Hats, Flowers, Lute and Violin Strings,…
Read MoreSt Mary Le Strand
In 1147 the site was occupied by the church of The Nativity Of Our Lady and the Innocents. This was demolished in 1549 to make way for Somerset House, Protector Somerset promised to rebuild it but never did so and for nearly 200 years the parishioners had used the Savoy Chapel. A maypole used to…
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