Petrolheads and airheads
The future has come to the Strand, in the form of a beautiful machine – the Bloodhound. Currently filling the front window of Coutts Bank with its pointy-nosed enquiry into what sort of world might make use of it, this gleaming blur of potential encapsulates an ambition: to reach a speed of 1,000 mph and…
Read MoreBloodhound 1
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair!
Vultures waiting for the garden to die: I remember taking this photograph, looking at the crane and the sign advertising office space, and thinking they were like vultures gazing down greedily on the last struggles of the community garden as it faced eviction from the site. Community garden on the Odhams Press site 1979: There was so…
Read MoreBuilding construction and demolition Strand Palace Hotel Foyer 1930 – 31
Few Art Deco buildings were more glamorous than the luxury hotel. In England, Claridges, the Savoy and the brand new Dorchester all had sumptuous Art Deco interiors. But Oliver P. Bernard’s designs for the Strand Palace made this one of the most celebrated hotel interiors in London. Bernard had worked as a set-designer in theatre…
Read MoreExeter ‘Change
Originally submitted by Chris Kenyon Jones A shopping mall – with a zoo upstairs – once occupied what is now the site of the Strand Palace Hotel. The Exeter Exchange (or ‘Exeter ’Change’) was originally built in the late 17th century to house a collection of small shops at ground level. From the 1770s to…
Read MoreThe silent industrial past of Long Acre
[missing audio]
Read MoreThe ebb and flow of the Strand
Submitted by David Green The Strand means the same in English as it does in various other languages – Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, German – even Old Norse and Old English. It’s a place where land and water meet; where things run aground, where things are ‘stranded’ – left when the waters recede. This is true…
Read MoreCount Peter and the Savoy
This week has seen the return to the Strand of a very important figure: Count Peter of Savoy. He’s the gilded figure on the pediment entrance to the Savoy Hotel who looks like a Wagnerian extra on the run. Now resplendently restored and polished, he looks alarmingly like Darth Vader. But it’s good to see…
Read MoreScaffolding
‘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…
Read More