Centuries
‘Gaiety George’ and the Making of Modern Celebrity
During the 1890s and 1900s the Strand’s Gaiety theatre played host to a string of dazzlingly successful shows featuring the ‘Gaiety Girls.’ For the project Moving Past Present I invited artist Janina Lange to ‘reanimate’ two of the Gaiety’s best-known stars, Constance Collier and Ellaline Terriss, as digital avatars. The process of researching their lives…
Read MoreVictorian Lives Revealed
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…
Read MoreMrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse
In the 1720s, Mrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse (a warehouse was a sort of 18th-century department store) in the Strand opposite Exeter Change. According to the trade card that William Hogarth engraved for her, she stocked ‘all sort of Italian silks as Lustrings, Sattins, Padesois, Velvets, Damasks, &c, Fans, Leghorne Hats, Flowers, Lute and Violin Strings,…
Read MoreThe Vaudeville Theatre
A few doors down from the Adelphi is the pretty building which houses the Vaudeville Theatre.Built in 1870, Henry Irving acted on this stage for a while, as Ronald Bergan’s book The Great Theatres of London tells us.
Read MoreSt Mary Le Strand
In 1147 the site of St Mary le Strand was occupied by the church of The Nativity Of Our Lady and the Innocents. This was demolished in 1549 to make way for Somerset House, Protector Somerset promised to rebuild it but never did so and for nearly 200 years the parishioners had used the Savoy…
Read MoreMermen on Somerset House
Metropole Hotel Invoice
This is an invoice regarding the Metropole (or Metripole as gt Grandpa spelt it). J Garrod was Joseph Garrod, my great grandfather. The business was carried on by Edward, my grandfather and James & William my father and his brother. It is still going, trading as Garrod Brothers in North London. The owners are still family,…
Read MoreMlle. Sarah Bernhardt and the National Theatre
In Matthew Arnold’s essay on ‘The French Theatre’ (1879) he urges on the movement to found a national theatre and fancifully imagines French comediens departing for London and passing ‘along the Strand… I see a fugitive vision of delicate features under a shower of hair and a cloud of lace, and hear the voice of…
Read MoreWalking 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…
Read MoreA Day in the Life Of…(at the Age Concern Day Centre, Odhams Walk)
The Strandlines team met with a group supported by the Age Concern Day Centre three times this December. Most meetings involved discussions of distant memories: how the local area had changed over the past fifty years, for instance. On Friday 3rd December, however, we decided to take a different tack. Strandlines is not only interested…
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