The Savoy hotel is a treasure trove of weird and intriguing events over the last century of Strand history. In 1896, per the Fairmont Hotel Group blog, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre was the first woman to smoke in public and did so at the Savoy. “The Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, the first woman to smoke in public, chose The Savoy as ...

An Interview with Professor Michael Trapp, Department of Classics, King’s College London By Freya Zhang The Somerset House courtyard, with Michael Pinsky's Pollution Pods, April 2018. In her essay ‘The external sculptural decoration of Somerset House: And the documentary sources’, Susan Jenkins writes: "It is clear that Sir William Chambers planned a sustained and sophisticated iconographical program for the external ...

In 1905, the courtyard of the Savoy hotel was flooded with four feet of water to host the party of American city planner, architect, and millionaire, George Kessler. While probably being one of the most luxurious and ludicrous events to ever occur at a London hotel, and certainly on the Strand, it is rather poorly reported upon by the hotel ...

To mark London History Day 2019, Professor Clare Brant, Director of Strandlines, and Assistant Editor Fran Allfrey put together a tour of past, present, and future green space around Aldwych. We're excited to release highlights from the tour here for anyone to use. All you need is your phone with data, or connected to The Cloud wifi, which is available ...

Editors' note: The Strandlines editors are always scouring for news and research about the Strand area. Below we’re delighted to be sharing an extract from 'Here’s everything we learned from this map of London’s defunct tram network', by Jonn Elledge. You can read the entire article on CityMetric. Anyone who has worked, studied around, or visited the Strand has probably ...

Micah Anne Neale is a 3rd-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and volunteered for Layers of London in Summer 2019. Her thesis topic is the musical lives of eighteenth-century domestic servants in Britain, and her research interests include early modern social and cultural history, the history of work and the history of gender. Devereux Court, a narrow ...

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 History Day with our minds ...

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 thanks to the Layers of ...

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 of bordering, of holding together ...