People of the Strand: Helen Noni Jabavu (1919-2008)

The Strand Magazine, most popularly known as home to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, launched in 1891. However, dwindling circulation coupled with inflating costs eventually led to the closure of the publication in March 1950. Eleven years buried, Ernest Kay and crime novelist, John Creasey, came together as joint proprietors to revive the literary magazine.…

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The Women Writers’ Club

“The Writers’ Club which has its rooms in Hastings House, Norfolk Street Strand, is both social and professional. Both characters are successfully combined, and it affords pleasant entertainment and many comfortable privileges to a class of hardworking women who have little time for social life, enabling them to help each other in the most direct…

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Introducing Motherland to Fatherland

Editor’s Note: Motherland to Fatherland, an exhibition, is set to open at the India Club at 143, Strand, on the 29th March 2020, 5pm to 9pm. Strandlines invited the project’s creator, Shrutika Jain, to explain how the project came about, and to give an insight into the stories the exhibition will explore. What is Motherland…

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Repost from Courtauld Digital Media: Epstein’s Strand Statues

The statues in situ on the Strand before 1937 (CON_B07186_F003_009)

Editors’ note: The Strandlines editors are always scouring for news and research about the Strand area. Below we’re delighted to be sharing an extract from ‘The Strand Statues’, a piece by Leonora Monson, a Courtauld Connects Digitisation Placement student. Thank you to the Courtauld Digitisation team for allowing us to share. The Courtauld Connects Digitisation…

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Repost from Courtauld Digital Media: Visions of London

Detail: Design of the Strand, E Maxwell Fry. CON_B04814_F006_001. The Courtauld Institute of Art. CC-BY-NC.

Editors’ note: The Strandlines editors are always scouring for news and research about the Strand area. Below we’re delighted to be sharing an extract of ‘Visions of London’, a piece by Hannah Wilson, a Courtauld Connects Digitisation placement student. Thank you to the Courtauld Digitisation team for allowing us to share a snippet of Hannah’s…

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The Eleanor (Charing) Cross

The story of the Eleanor Cross begins with the death of Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, on 28th of November 1290. A series of twelve crosses marked the resting places of the funerary cortège which began in Nottingham, where Eleanor died, and made stops at towns between Lincoln and Westminster Abbey. Charing Cross…

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The York Watergate

York Water Gate. London. Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

When the Duke of Buckingham ordered his York House (approximately located at present day 38 Strand) to be modernised in 1623, “it was customary for nobility to be conveyed by water” [1] while the less convenient carriages were preferred for state purposes. This made the building of private watergates by the river very common in…

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Let’s All Go Down the Strand – For the Age of Brexit

One night half a dozen toffs met together in Westminster A severing from the continent was planned Empathy and sense were summarily banned ‘Let’s inflame irrational nationalism! It won’t hurt us when it backfires’ Decorate a bus in lies Lie some more when they ask why And then dance around the union’s funeral pyre Let’s…

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Twinings and Lloyds Intertwined

Twinings portico ©Heather Tweed

Part One Twinings has long been associated with fine teas but the company actually sprang from Tom’s Coffee House. This blog explores a little of that early history and links to Tweed family members who lie within my own ancestral tree. Walking along the Strand in 1706 a waft of aromatic coffee and stimulating chit…

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The Mau Mau Case: Post-Colonial Justice on the Strand

“This is a historic judgement today, which will have repercussions for years to come” – Leigh Day Prosecution team. The Mau Mau insurgency, also known in Britain as the ‘Emergency Period’, was an eight year span of violence in colonial Kenya (1952-60). In 2012, the British High Court of Justice, inside the Royal Courts of…

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