Charing Cross Station

To me, Charing Cross Station is such a fixture of the western end of the Strand that is difficult to think that it is not yet 150 years old. I pass the station often when I leave the tube at Embankment on my way to King’s College. In the nineteenth-century, Charing Cross was an example…

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Building construction and demolition Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square marks the western entrance to the Strand. Trafalgar Square was begun in 1840, to provide a more dignified frontage to the new National Gallery as well as a memorial to Nelson’s naval victory at Trafalgar and a reminder of the might of the burgeoning British Empire. After much arguing, Nelson’s column was finally…

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The street of the definite article

The street of the definite article The strand. The one two the iambic chaos The rush through it, on it and under it The busy busy The buses the bridges the protests The lawyers the law courts the justice, The cafes, the authors The Dickens, the Thackery the Makepeace The temple inn The no children…

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Aldwych 1910

This photograph of the Aldwych, before the building of Bush House, was found on the Partleton ‘In their Shoes’ website. 

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Mary Brookes, 1603

In 1603 Mary Brookes, a young London woman, was picked up by constables at the house of Agnes Allowin, a laundress and starcher who was also running a bawdy house in three rooms in Northumberland Alley, near Aldgate. Mary Brookes was taken to Bridewell, London’s house of correction on suspicion of sexual misconduct, where she…

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Walking in the footsteps of ancestors…

I have worked for King’s College for almost twenty years but little did I know that I had another family link to the Strand.  This emerged as a result of my deciding to research our family tree for my father’s 80th birthday.  He has ancestors, as far back as the late 1700s, who moved from…

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