Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World

After reading​ Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin’s concise history of the Strand, you will never walk down that street again without thinking of the hippopotami that wallowed in a primeval swamp at the Trafalgar Square end. The bones of the hippos, as well as those of ‘herds of straight-tusked elephants and prides of lions’, were unearthed in 1957, when Uganda House was being built. The Strand, which today has its western limit at Trafalgar Square, was first recorded in the Roman period, as the lesser of the two roads west of walled Londinium. According to the authors, it was ‘likely constructed after the revolt of Boudicca in 60-61 ce’ (I’ve given up the fight about academics setting a bad example by using ‘likely’ as an adverb). The main road was what’s now Oxford Street; on the lesser road, the business of life and death carried on: Roman cemeteries have been found under the Savoy Hotel and a sarcophagus and pottery kiln under St Martin-in-the-Fields.

The full sweep of English history is presented through the prism of this thoroughfare, starting with the prehistoric ‘boggy wetland scrummage’ on the banks of the Thames in the early days of human habitation, when it was like the Norfolk Broads. When you next pass the Coutts building at 440 Strand, the ‘first fully-fledged atrium office building’ in London, you will think not only of banking halls but of Lundenwic, the lost Anglo-Saxon town – not discovered until the 1980s – that lies beneath it. Lundenwic emerged two centuries after the Romans retreated from Britain and covered the area now bordered by Long Acre and Kingsway to the north. The authors suggest that superstition might have led the Anglo-Saxons to build outside the old Roman walls: did they imagine ghosts as they ‘surveyed from afar the colossal wreck, boundless and bare, of the Roman amphitheatre, and of the collapsed basilica and forum’? Perhaps they simply found it more convenient. The old Roman bridge across the Thames was impassable by that time, and the Strand was the first dry and elevated land west of the London Fen, and was close to the ford that was then the only crossing place. In the late seventh century a new church called the West Minster was built at the ford, rivalling the first incarnation of St Paul’s (built in 604) further east. Archaeological finds show that Lundenwic was a cosmopolitan town of around nine thousand inhabitants at its peak and ‘alive with busy craft industries’, including the carving of bone and antler and textile manufacture using wool or flax.

With the reassuring predictability of a children’s history book, the next historic event discussed is the pillaging of the Strand by the Vikings. The ninth-century church of St Clement Danes may have been named in commemoration of the Great Heathen Army’s overwintering in London in 871-72. I shall think of Vikings huddling together for warmth when I walk from Embankment to Joe Allen’s, on the corner of Burleigh Street and the Strand, for birthday suppers. In 886 King Alfred reoccupied Lundenwic and rechristened it Lundenburh. The Strand is recorded in charters as the Akemannestrete – the road to Bath – and took a sharp right at a hamlet called Cierring (Charing Cross), went up what is now the Haymarket and carried on west past the Ritz and Harrods. Quite wiggly for a Roman road.

It’s not until 1100 that a surviving building is named, Westminster Hall. At the time, the Strand (the first record of its being called the ‘Stronde’ is in 1185, so named for its proximity to the Thames) ‘connected the commercial centre of the City with the courtly and religious life of Westminster’ and was therefore a ‘street of civic pride and pageantry’. The events of 13 October 1247, the Feast of Edward the Confessor, were ‘not untypical’, according to the authors, though it can’t have been an everyday experience to see the king dressed in sackcloth and carrying a reliquary of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his coronation route, Henry III processed on foot from St Paul’s to a Westminster Abbey undergoing reconstruction, where he was greeted by more than a hundred monks ‘tearfully singing and exulting’.

In an echo of the hippos’ swamp, the Strand was so deep in mud in 1315 that Edward II signed an ordinance to pave it, though the work needed to be redone in 1353, just as the Black Death swept through London. By 1400, the great medieval flourishing of the Strand had begun. At the time, it was the first road above the northern bank of the Thames; its newly built palaces, most of them the London seats of diocesan bishops, had gardens that spanned the full acreage down to the river, and water gates for access by boat. With great canniness, the bishops ensured that their houses had a row of tenements or ‘rents’ on the Strand, raking in money for their diocese. The crenellated Savoy Palace, first built in 1236, housed 150 knights and many clerks, including Geoffrey Chaucer. Browell and Chanin suggest that Chaucer may have written the Canterbury Tales there, but this seems unlikely. As they point out, the palace was destroyed by Wat Tyler’s rioters in 1381 (Chaucer began the Canterbury Tales in 1387).

Two maps, Georg Braun’s of 1572 and Wenceslaus Hollar’s of 1660, help illustrate the urban transformation of the Strand in the 16th and 17th centuries. It went from a picturesque road bordered by fields to the north to the largest in a hubbub of streets leading to squares, including Covent Garden (marked on Hollar’s map as a ‘piazza’). The dissolution of the monasteries had transferred ‘the wealth of the great religious houses to a Protestant landed elite’ and the Strand became a ‘museum mile’, with its eleven great mansions displaying the finest antiquities and artworks. The earl of Leicester rebuilt what had been the episcopal palace of the bishops of Exeter, filling it with paintings and tapestries. There were some brutal evictions. Robert Cecil used ‘strong-arm tactics’ to acquire land from the bishop of Durham and hastily evicted the sitting tenant, Walter Raleigh. Arundel House, the most gorgeous palace of them all, was acquired by Alethea Howard and her husband, the earl of Arundel. These patrons of the arts exposed their ‘jewells of art to publicke view’ – these ‘jewells’ being a peerless library, Greek and Roman sculptures, seventeen Raphaels and a garden designed by Inigo Jones. Denmark House, as Somerset House was called when occupied by Anne of Denmark, had a fountain thirty feet high and eighty feet wide: ‘a huge rocky re-creation of Mount Parnassus’, with a cavern containing the nine muses in marble and four streams representing the great rivers of England. York House, once the home of the bishops of Norwich, was rebuilt by the duke of Buckingham with a Rubens ceiling depicting the duke’s apotheosis. Its only remnant is the old water gate in Embankment Gardens.

The Civil War, which is covered in just one page (as is the First World War, bizarrely), ended the Strand’s period as a Renaissance idyll. Somerset House became a barracks for Parliamentarian soldiers. The other great houses ‘never recovered from the damage’ of the war and the interregnum. But because of its width and centrality, the Strand retained its ceremonial significance: the diarist Thomas Rugge described Charles II’s triumphant return along the Strand to Whitehall, to the sound of ‘such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard the like’. John Evelyn went further:

This day, his majesty, Charles II, came to London … with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine; the mayor, aldermen and all the companies, in their liveries, chains of gold, and banners; lords and nobles, clad in cloth of silver, gold and velvet; the windows and balconies, all set with ladies; trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing the city, even from two in the afternoon till nine at night. I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God.

After the Great Fire, which fortunately ‘lost its potency at Temple’ as the ‘winds slackened’, speculative building began in the streets north of the Strand (the remains of Lundenwic had long since vanished beneath fields). Pepys sometimes stopped for lunch – ox tongue and curds and cream, washed down by a cup of whey from the milk bar in the cellars – or to visit his bookseller or flageolet maker. After the Italianate elegance of earlier centuries, the 18th-century Strand became ‘a hub of knowledge and innovation’, with instrument makers catering to every new scientific pursuit. Jonathan Sisson’s workshop had a high reputation for mathematical instruments; John and Peter Dollond, opticians, made the first telescope to be encased in mahogany (Captain Cook always travelled with his ‘Dollond’).

Thomas Twining opened a coffee house at the House of the Golden Lyon on Devereux Court, just off the Strand, in 1706. Then came the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley and Hans Sloane met ‘alongside medical men’, Rawthmells on Henrietta Street and the Slaughter Coffee House in St Martin’s Lane. Samuel Reiss’s Grand Cigar Divan replaced the Fountain Tavern, where the Kit-Cat Club used to meet: entry was a shilling and sixpence (for coffee and a cigar), or for 21 shillings a year you could drink as much coffee as you liked. ‘These meeting places,’ the authors write, ‘became the libraries and colleges from which information expanded.’ They were hubs of free speech. The Tudor Somerset House was demolished in 1775 and replaced by the huge neoclassical building we know today. The Royal Academy took up residence in 1779, and other learned societies joined it.

In 1815, the young doctor Benjamin Golding opened his home on Leicester Place ‘every morning to treat the poverty-stricken population of largely distressed Irish labourers and costermongers inhabiting the hovels and tenements in the area’. Demand was so high that three years later he founded the West London Infirmary and Dispensary, which grew into a combined hospital and medical school. This was the first Charing Cross Hospital, which became associated with the newly established University of London and erected its own building in the early 1830s as part of the west Strand improvements. The types of injury seen there attest to the number of building projects in the area. In 1850, the hospital treated 3200 cases relating to building and excavation alone. In 1852, it saw 17,995 patients, of whom 821 had fallen from a height, 246 had been injured by vehicles or steam-powered machinery, 99 had been hurt in explosions or suffered burns and 900 were ‘assaulted or bitten by animals’.

The area around the Strand wasn’t pleasant, according to T.H. Huxley, who as a student in the 1840s regularly made the journey from Charing Cross Hospital to the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and described not only the general squalor but the ‘roar of words, filthy and brutal beyond imagination … within hearing of the traffic of the Strand’. At 3 a.m. every day from that same decade, William Henry Smith (note the initials) at 186 Strand took delivery of ‘raw [news]papers’ from Fleet Street, wrapped them in twine – he got through a hundred miles of the stuff each week – and loaded them onto carts for delivery to the railways. The company occupied a significant portion of east Strand, with stables for sixty horses.

The noise and smells of the Strand are never far away in this book. After the Great Stink of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, began designing the new embankment and roadway, complete with sewers running beneath the street. Acres of mud were shifted. And then the lights came on. The journalist John Hollingshead opened the Gaiety Theatre in 1868, its façade illuminated with dazzling electric lighting. The Hotel Cecil was built between 1890 and 1896 on the site of Cecil (or Salisbury) House; at night the reflections of the lights from its eight hundred guest rooms and great banqueting hall could be seen dancing on the Thames. The creation of Northumberland Avenue in 1874 saw the destruction of the last of the Renaissance palaces, Northumberland House, which belonged to the Percy family. The Metropolitan Board of Works paid the 5th duke half a million pounds to relocate; he followed other members of the aristocracy in moving further west. Canaletto’s painting of the house, from 1752, shows the view from across the large clearing that would become Trafalgar Square. The equestrian statue of Charles I, erected just to one side of Northumberland House in 1675, remains in place today and is considered the central point of the city, the place from which distances ‘to London’ are officially measured.

The Strand palaces of the late 19th century were hotels – the Savoy and the Strand Palace, with their constant supply of hot and cold running water. The first issue of the Strand Magazine was published in 1891, with a cover illustration by George Haité. The letters of the title are strung across the street like bunting, while the view looks east, showing the spires of two churches (St Mary-le-Strand and St Clement Danes) and the neo-gothic spire of the Royal Courts of Justice. In 1901, readers queued round the block outside the paper’s office in Burleigh Street for the next instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Despite​ the street’s width, the traffic was terrible. The rush of visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 had brought the Strand to a standstill. The junction at Aldwych and Kingsway was seen as ‘an inadequate centre point for the capital of a global-power Britain’, according to Browell and Chanin. Local ratepayers petitioned Parliament about the disordered state of the thoroughfare. The end was in sight for pretty Wych Street, which was demolished in 1901 to make way for a much wider Aldwych.

In 1904, in one twelve-hour period, observers recorded 2582 omnibuses, 1285 hansom cabs, 790 trade vehicles, 286 four-wheelers, 228 bicycles, 112 carriages and 93 barrows passing along the Strand. The Evening Standard worried that Jacob Epstein’s eighteen nude statues on the new British Medical Association building were ‘laid bare to the gaze of all classes, young and old, in perhaps the busiest thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the world’. ‘They are a form of statuary,’ the Standard added, ‘which no careful father would wish his daughter and no discriminating young man would wish his fiancée to see.’ But Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery, which moved to its Trafalgar Square building in 1838, disagreed. Along with the Rokeby Venus, which the gallery had acquired in 1906, these statues seemed to Holroyd ‘a significant marker of more advanced public opinion in Britain’. They were still causing outrage in 1937, after the building became the Rhodesian High Commission, when protruding parts were removed supposedly ‘as a measure of public safety’, much to Epstein’s outrage.

The book’s coverage of the 20th century is necessarily selective. There’s a terrifying photograph of St Clement Danes ablaze in 1941, and one of Londoners getting off a bus at the moment in June 1944 when a V1 bomb landed on Aldwych. The authors discuss Maurice Wilkins’s attempts to X-ray DNA (data that would underpin Watson and Crick’s model) in the new biophysics unit of King’s College London, which required his PhD student Raymond Gosling to nip across to the Strand branch of Woolworth’s to buy plasticine and paperclips for mounting ‘rehydrated DNA in special cameras’. They plugged hydrogen leaks with a condom – making them worthy successors of the area’s 18th-century instrument makers – though it’s not clear why three whole pages are devoted to their activities.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Strand was in great danger from developers who wanted to ‘tidy up London’s unwelcome urban clutter’. Thanks to campaigning by the newly formed Covent Garden Community Association, the plan to turn the area north of the Strand into a superhighway with elevated pedestrian walkways was scotched. One of the chief campaigners was John Betjeman, who then turned his attention to the restoration of St Mary-le-Strand. He dedicated one of his last poems to the church, which he described as ‘a baroque paradise’.

A paragraph on the many closures of the 1970s and 1980s makes for dispiriting reading: the Italian restaurant Gatti’s, the Tivoli Cinema, Yates’ Wine Lodge, Mooney’s and Henekey’s pubs, the Lyons Corner House, the Civil Service Stores and so on, but the redeveloped Coutts building, with its splendid atrium, marked an upturn in the street’s fortunes. The Strand still hosts some grand and long-standing establishments as well as more transitory cafés, chain restaurants and tourist shops. It’s not so much lovely as full of interest. The Nell Gwynne pub has existed on the same site since 1667. Hidden behind the Savoy Hotel, the King’s Chapel of the Savoy is the last remnant of a hospital (in the original sense of the word) for the homeless founded by Henry VIII and completed in 1515. It still holds regular services. In the basement of Australia House is a 900-year-old holy well; the water from it is fresh enough to drink. In 1848 the Grand Cigar Divan began serving food to its hungry chess players and was renamed Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern. Over time it morphed into a restaurant proper, Simpson’s in the Strand, which closed in 2020 but is due to reopen next year. At the western end of the street, Charing Cross Station dispatches tens of thousands of commuters and tourists each day; at the eastern end, the façade of the long since closed Strand Underground station is still visible (tours are occasionally permitted). Modernity imposes itself, with new pedestrian zones and bicycle lanes, but many of the buildings are now listed and further big demolition projects unlikely.

Among the scenarios the authors imagine for the future of the Strand (including submersion under 200 feet of water), they conjure a vision of the street ‘at the heart of a regenerated and confident London … in the midst of a technological and humanist renewal’. I wonder what exactly they mean by ‘humanist’. The Strand’s two churches have, over the centuries, provided the most elusive aspect of this ever evolving street: continuity.