Strandlines is a digital community dedicated to exploring lives on the Strand—past, present, creative. It combines materials from archives, especially Archives at King’s College London and Westminster Archives, with life writing in its widest sense contributed by people who are simply interested in the Strand, and who may also have an association with it through work, visiting or residence.

Strandlines aims to serve as a home for experiences, memories and reflections about the local area; a gallery where films, photographs, drawings, and audio files can be viewed and listened to; a place where residents, workers and visitors can engage with one another by sharing stories and images.

The area which Strandlines represents runs east-west from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street, and north-south from Covent Garden to the Thames: the Strand is its centre.

Background

Strandlines began in 2011 as a project funded by JISC, involving people from several departments at King’s College London, to establish digital community on the Strand. It had grants from AHRC and LCACE for community engagement, especially through the arts. With the help of Dr Hope Wolf as researcher, it made a high watermark among community engagement projects. In 2017 it was rescued, redesigned and relaunched as a digital community bringing together lives past, present and creative.

Life-writing

Life writing is a genre which includes memoir, testimony, reminiscence, letters, diaries, blogs and other forms of autobiography and biography; it can also include film, photography, visual and material arts. Like oral history, it values information about the past, though life writing also encourages awareness of literary and creative characteristics in the present and how these may shape accounts of the past.