streets and roads
Childhood days in Embankment Gardens
This is my sister, Kate, eating ice cream (or is it yoghurt?) on a September day in 1982. This was a few years before I was born, but it’s evocative of my own childhood memories of the Strand. We grew up in Kent, but our parents’ roots are further North, so we would often pass…
Read MoreSockmob Walking Tour
On Wednesday last week I was given a new perspective on the Strand area. Certainly I had walked its lines before: I had been to Temple tube station, the arches under the Adelphi, Embankment Park, the Cole Hole, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Yet, I shall now look these familiar places and spaces differently: they have…
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 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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