Stories
David Stone, 64, is a PHD Literature student King’s College London who also spent his late teens in medical school at Charring Cross hospital: he is an expert on the changes in the Strand area in the last 50 or so years.
Wendy Pank is School Administrator: Strategic Communications, Innovation & Research at King's College, London. Wendy began her career at King's in Schools Liaison, which was led by the then Dean of Arts, and part of External Relations, although it was housed in the Arts Faculty space during its early days.
Over the last few weeks as I make my way to King’s, I’ve passed a curious sight. At the corner of Arundel Street and the Strand is (to my mind) a singularly unattractive building, a behemoth of geometric grey slabs and shabby windows, an unsympathetic conglomeration of cuboids thrown down between the river and the trees which approach the law courts, overpowering the more delicate aesthetics of the facing St. Clement Danes and the statue of Gladstone with its surrounding female figures, representing Courage, Education, Aspiration and Brotherhood.
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 »
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 »