Search: Novelists, playwrights and poets

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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 »

 ...Catching Up

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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.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers; coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles - life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night... Read more »

Northumberland House was one of the last survivors of the noblemen’s palaces which originally lined the Strand. It stood on the south side of Trafalgar Square at the start of the Strand, and was recognised by its distinctive lion on the top of the roof. This lion is the symbol of the Dukes of Northumberland, and its twin now stands on the gates to Syon Park in West London. It's strange to think that, before the rapid expansion of London, Syon Park would have been considered a country residence in the early nineteenth-century! Read more »

Lady Precious Stream is a spoken drama adaptation of a Chinese opera (Wang Baochuan Read more »

 ‘Discover a local Golden Moment’: advertisement for Symonds cider, on the bus stop outside the entrance to King’s College London, April/May 2011 (now removed). Read more »

The street of the definite article

The strand.

The one two the iambic chaos

The rush through it, on it and under it

The busy busy

The buses the bridges the protests

The lawyers the law courts the justice,

The cafes, the authors

The Dickens, the Thackery the Makepeace

The temple inn

The no children

The Strand school for civil service gone,

The whirling doors on the King’s building

The Students, the must just read hard enough

The elect alumni, on the plate glass

The bus Read more »

I have just found these unpublished lines from a draft of Eliot's The Waste Land:

"This music crept by me upon the waters"    Queen Victoria

And along the Strand, and up the ghastly hill of Cannon Street,

Fading at last, behind by flying feet,

There where the tower was traced against the night

Of Michael Paternoster Royal, red and white.

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