The Life of a Cell in the Strand – an Interview

Miao Zhao is a PhD candidate at the Department of Physics, King’s College London. She was one of these students who first returned to work in the lab at Strand Campus shortly after the lift of full lockdown and witnessed a Strand unprecedented. Here, she shares with us her personal experience and memory of a…

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The Pathway of the Imaginary

This article translation into English by Katie Webb from the original Italian, ‘Il sentiero dell’imaginario’ by Loris Ferri, was published in El Ghibli magazine on 10th December 2021 http://www.el-ghibli.org/il-sentiero-dellimmaginario/#sdfootnote2anc. El Ghibli is an international literary magazine for migration. The poem ‘Wanderer’ appears in the original English taken from the pamphlet Wanderer published by The Pottery…

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Freedom Narratives

The Freedom Narratives project is an open-source digital repository that includes biographical accounts of individuals born in Africa between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This mostly comprises people who were born free but later became enslaved and who many times regained their freedom later in life.   This project contributes in original ways to the…

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Money, Money, Money…

The recent 3-day strike over university teachers’ pay has begun a new debate over why women are not paid as much as men, is there real equality within university pay, and pen- sion-related issues. On December 1st I received a number of auto-emails in my inbox telling me that my messages wouldn’t be read by…

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People on the Strand: John Nourse and Francis Wingrave, booksellers

Nowadays, tracking down out of print books involves a quick email or checking booksellers’ websites. Two or three centuries ago, anyone hunting rare volumes wrote to booksellers and other collectors although few examples of this correspondence survive. During the 18th century the Strand was a flourishing centre for London’s book trade and associated industries, including…

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The Right to Protest

It’s incredible what you come across on a small walk along the Strand. I was walking towards the Temple tube station after finishing an interview with the India Club’s Phiroza Marker, when I came across a small gathering of 6 people outside a gated building. I didn’t know what the building was or who the people…

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The Strand’s Arisings

Like many Strandliners I was away from the Strand during Covid-19 lockdowns. A long absence! Seventeen months! What would it be like after so long? On my first day back in London, I thought a stroll along the Strand was in order, to catch a little of the atmosphere of cautious reanimating and contribute to…

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Temple Church: Magna Carta and the Knights Templar

The filming location of the Da Vinci Code [2006], survivor of the Fire of London and WW2 bombing,  a secret meeting place of a back-stabbing king, the core of the City’s major legal district, and London’s first bank – Temple Church has witnessed milestones in English history. In medieval London there were ‘more churches than…

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