1800-1899
Stanley Gibbons's stamp shop was not the only mecca for nineteenth-century collectors, as Dr Adelene Buckland (English Department, King's College London) demonstrated at the 'Shows of London' seminar series on Monday night at King's (see http://showsoflondon.wordpress.com/). On the opposite side of the street to Gibbons's establishment, at 149 Strand, was a mineral shop from 1804-1881. Read more »
If you look across to the south side of the Strand, you can see the entrance to the original Strand Campus of King's College London.
King's College London's Strand Gate, 2012
The College was founded in 1829, and subsequently joined the University of London. The original entrance looked very different; it was a small, undemonstrative gateway off the busy nineteenth-century Strand.
The 'Roman' bath, though not the buildings over it, dates from the early seventeenth century. The Watch House, once belonging to St Clement Danes, looks early nineteenth century in its present form, but there are documents to show that there was a building of this shape (projecting over the Lane) already in 1724, and a St Clement Danes Watch House on the Lane already in 1607. The patch of brickwork at bottom left, directly under the Watch House outer wall, is seventeenth century and the last bit of the old Somerset House still visible above ground level.
Crowds watching the Duke of Wellington's funeral procession on 18 November 1852 - no-one now on top of St Mary's (Illustrated London News 27 November 1852, 472)
On 29 April 1802, crowds assembled to watch a grand procession, celebrating the proclamation of peace between Great Britain and France; as the report published in The European Magazine 41 (January - June 1802), 410, reveals, not all of them lived to tell the tale: Read more »
Not far from the theatres, still on the north side of the Strand, is the world-famous Stanley Gibbons stamp shop.
Stanley Gibbons. Photo taken April 2012.
Their website shows what the shop looked like in the late-nineteenth century, when it was at 391 Strand:
Stanley Gibbons, founded in 1856, on the late-Victorian Strand. Images from the Stanley Gibbons website.
On Saturday, Dickens came to the Strand – in the ambitious form of Dickensfest! ~ an event co-organised by The Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s (where Strandlines lives) and Westminster Archives. Many thanks to Ruth Richardson and Judith Bottomley for inspiration and organisation. Read more »
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.
Vaudeville Theatre today.
Interior of the newly-opened Vaudeville Theatre in 1870. Westminster Archives Centre.
Carrying on along the north side of the Strand, heading east towards Fleet Street and away from Trafalgar Square, we reach the Adelphi theatre.
The Adelphi theatre today.
