To the Friendship of English Speaking Peoples

February is LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK! Strandlines invites contributions from past and present Strand-dwellers, visitors, and dreamers all year round, however, we launched a call this year for contributions to mark the History Month. The story below was contributed by Tam Lin. Thank you for sharing your own ‘strand’ with us! We are…

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Class of 2020: Graduating From a Distance

A common epithet to describe the coronavirus has been “the invisible enemy”. Not only does the use of the chosen adjective, ‘invisible’, hint at the nature of a biological threat, but it also perpetuates an understanding of the virus as an abstraction, this other-worldly description questions its reality. In a swift four and a half…

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Protests: spring 2020

Workers, students, and anyone visiting the Strand can’t have missed the picket lines, teach outs, and rallies taking place outside the King’s and Courtauld campuses over 14 days in March. Workers from across the both universities on the Strand – including cleaners and library staff as well as teachers – were joined by students and…

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King’s College London Chapel Preservation Project

At King’s College London Archives our remit is to preserve and provide access to the material in our care. This project is an experiment in how we might apply that philosophy to digitally preserve our physical objects and spaces. The buildings of King’s have a rich history and have changed much over the years. The…

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‘March in February’ 2018

The Strand has been home to innumerable protests over the years, with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, creating perhaps the most enduring folk memory. Strandlines could encompass the Stop the War march of 2003 which was variously estimated to be between one and three million people, still the largest political demonstration in…

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Göttingen and the Strand: Publishers and Princes

Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen

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…

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The changing face of (academic) retail

The empty King's Shop in November 2017

I worked at King’s College London for seven years, and I was a student there a long time before that. I have many memories of interesting projects at the College, but this post is about one in particular—in 2009 I helped to build a new retail space for the university on the corner of Surrey…

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Victorian Lives Revealed

King's College London Main Building ~1830

King’s College London has employed some of the great and good from the academic world over its 188 years but there are many members of staff, academics, technicians, clerical and domestic, who are less well-known or not known at all. King’s College London Main Building ~1830 A joint project between King’s College London Archives and…

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