1980-1989
This is my sister, Kate, eating ice cream (or is it yoghurt?) on a September day in 1982. This was a few years before I was born, but it's evocative of my own childhood memories of the Strand.
As part of the Strand Lines Project I met with Dr Barrie Morgan to talk about his associations and interactions with the area whilst working at King’s. Dr Morgan was initially a Lecturer in the Geography Department when he first joined King’s in the late 1960’s. Read more »
On 11th May 2012 I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Fox for Strandlines. Jim first started working at King's on 19th January 1953 as an apprentice electrician, and retired in 1998 having been promoted to Site Engineer.
In Agatha Christie style, my subtitle is: “The Curious Case of the Poisoned Umbrella”, the assassination of Georgi Markov.
I should first declare some slight personal involvement: I am the widow of perhaps the most well regarded Bulgarian intellectual émigré: Petar Ouvaliev, cultural commentator for the BBC Bulgarian service at Bush House and to whom Georgi Markov wrote in the late ‘60s asking for help in obtaining work in the United Kingdom.
A successful and published writer in Bulgaria, why should Markov have wanted to come and perhaps settle in the UK? Read more »
Old London Street Scene (1899) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5Ts_i164c Read more »
This painting was donated to the Geography Department by Ruth Sekyi in 1988. Ruth studied at King's between 1985 and 1988 but died tragically young in car accident shortly after completing her studies. The painting is very much in keeping with Ruth's character - totally positive, full of energy and laughter but with a hint of seriousness. She was a great student in every respect and a lovely person.
My room in King’s College faces out on to the quad and throughout the day today I kept hearing a single shout , that sounded like ‘coaaal...’ coming from the building works on the east wing of Somerset House and repeated every few seconds. From ground level it was inaudible but from the fourth floor of the South Range it was clear. The sound seemed so ‘out of place’, so unusual, so elemental. It was such a human - and in that sense alien - addition to the normal Strand soundscape of traffic noise. Read more »
