Content types
Catching up
Much has been happening with Strandlines! Except keeping up with the blog. I take it up now in part because I’m giving a talk about blogs next month, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing; whoops, how embarrassing to have let Strandlines blog slip. In part too the blog has taken a back seat because…
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
Writing postcards
I was recently given some beautiful old Strand postcards to scan for the site. All of the postcards were blank. Instead of simply adding these postcards to the site as they were, I thought they might be used for a little life writing. In Strandlines sessions at the Age Concern Day Centre, Odhams Walk – also with…
Read MoreMetropole 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 MoreA memory of the Strand
This story was kindly contributed by Pattiyan. I have used CX station for years, right from my early working days c.1942. I remember going to lunch at the Strand Palace, Lyons corner house, and eating in the Salad Bar with a boy friend when I was sixteen. The boy I knew was waiting for his…
Read MoreSockmob Walking Tour
On Wednesday last week I was given a new perspective on the Strand area. Certainly I had walked its lines before: I had been to Temple tube station, the arches under the Adelphi, Embankment Park, the Cole Hole, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Yet, I shall now look these familiar places and spaces differently: they have…
Read MorePanoramas, Dress Circles and Tubes
In 1787 Robert Barker put a patent on a way of seeing: ‘panorama’. It is said that he came upon the term when surveying the city of Edinburgh from the top of Calton Hill. Moving to London, Barker reconstructed 360 degree views in a Leicester Square art gallery; an initiative mimicked by his son on…
Read MoreFord Madox Ford on the Strand in the nineteenth century
The Strand figures twice in Ford Madox Ford’s reminiscences about his pre-Raphaelite relations, Ancient Lights (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911). First in this passage which is revealing about the different experiences of place in different generations: I was talking the other day to a woman of position when she told me that her daughters were…
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