Dates
People of the Strand: Alice and Kimberley at Two Temple Place
Like many people, I have been enjoying the virtual offerings of museums and galleries during lockdown. For this post, I’m grateful to Two Temple Place for letting Strandlines share excerpts from their blog ‘Voices from Two Temple Place’. I can’t recommend the blog enough, and applaud the blog’s mission to be an ‘inclusive online platform…
Read MoreThe Strand’s Foggy Past in Conan Doyle’s Work
In the late 19th century, the Strand Magazine propelled Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings to new heights. This meteoric rise brought wider public attention to some of the issues that plagued London in the 1890s. In the Strand Magazine pieces, complex connections between writing by Doyle and the concerns of the Smoke Abatement Society are apparent.…
Read MorePeople of the Strand: Fortunatus (died 1601)
‘If one could choose a single location in which the encounter with cultural complexity became routine, it would be that unique gathering of peoples along the Thames.’ So says John Cramsie, author of a book about such encounters in the early modern period, though mostly ones away from London (British Travellers and the Encounter with…
Read MoreCelebrating Volunteers’ Week 2020
Strandlines couldn’t exist without the generous contributions of a fabulous group of volunteer researchers and creative writers. 1-7 June is Volunteers Week in the UK: a chance for organisations across the country to celebrate the amazing contributions that people make in their spare time around so many other committments. By way of a thank you…
Read MoreArundel Great Court: between redevelopment and conservation
180 Strand, the remaining part of the former Arundel Great Court, is located between Somerset House and the Inner Temple. Constructed between 1971 and 1976 the building stands as a brutalist landmark in the heart of the Strand. Once a multi-use office space, now an art and fashion hub, the site will soon be redeveloped…
Read MoreLife and Work on the Tower RNLI Lifeboat Pier
Anyone who has crossed the Waterloo bridge might have noticed the Royal National Lifeboat Institution Pier, on the north side of the Thames. This is the busiest lifeboat station in the United-Kingdom. I spoke to Stan Todd, a full-time helmsman on the station, and looked over archive materials, to find out more about how the…
Read MoreStranded
This is where Samuel Johnson first inspired me Where I discovered the Queen Victoria statue unexpectedly Devoured small tuna sandwiches with cucumber And realized one night, mournfully, I was too old to join the fun at the pub. It’s where I left my laptop at a café while eating lunch one day, Scurrying back to…
Read MoreAldwych: a not so abandoned station just below us
The Aldwych underground station on the junction between the Strand and Surrey Street has been closed for nearly thirty years. This lonely station, that stands at the place of the former Royal Strand Theatre, was part of a one-station branch of the Piccadilly line that connected to Holborn station. This short back-and-forth shuttle service to…
Read MoreStargazing from centuries gone by
In the 18th century, the Philosophical Transactions journal (then a relatively new publication) preserved several accounts of astronomical events as observed from the Strand. The Royal Society of London provided James Short, “from the College at Edinburgh”, this platform to publish his observations. In the Philosophical Transactions database Short’s name appears thirty-four times. Of these,…
Read MoreEssex street’s Watergate: a threshold to the bourgeois Strand
“He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps under the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that was the last I ever saw of him.” – The Diamond Maker by HG Wells (1894). An “in-between” space, the Essex street’s Watergate closes the street on its…
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