The Strand has offered up multiple perspectives to those who have lived and worked there. To British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, its very grandeur, was a reminder of the vast sweep of history: ‘perhaps the finest street in Europe, blending the architecture of many periods’. A pedestrian area - and accompanying street market - might then connect the Strand seamlessly with Trafalgar Square to fully realise the vision of architect John Nash and also lead to the overdue refurbishment of Charing Cross Station. It is to be hoped that the Strand’s landmarks will be preserved, notably the Savoy Hotel, Simpsons, Somerset House and the churches. A new and more terrifying pandemic remains a third possibility, perhaps one combining the virulence of diseases such as Ebola with the transmissibility of the common cold, leaving a pathetic rump of the population to eke out a living in exiled lands.
The Strand became a centre for scholarship. The Inns of Court at its east end, blessed with encyclopaedic libraries and curricula befitting England’s ‘third universitie’, were augmented by the fine libraries of rare books and manuscripts of the noble mansions. The Strand nobility nurtured talented gardeners; for instance, John Rose, reputedly the first person to cultivate the pineapple in England, was apprenticed in Leicester’s garden. The Restoration period thus witnessed the demolition or re-development of most of the Strand’s great houses, which never recovered from the damage inflicted by the English Civil War on the wealth and prestige of their owners. The Strand’s frontage diversified with taverns and shops, including the Golden Lion, White Lion and King’s Head. The Theatre Royal, however, was the first modern licensed theatre permitted to show serious drama and was the progenitor of the many theatres that now characterise the Strand and West End.
The celebrities associated with the latest palaces continually stoked Edwardian impressions of the Strand once again being a ‘golden mile’. Of great international fame in this era of duelling divas, Italian coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini dazzled London in 1907. Eviscerating buildings from the Strand’s philanthropic and benevolent past might bring to it shiny ‘palace hotels’. These might be thought to better suit the gay living of Edwardian days, freed from the imperial wars of the Victorian era. Yet shiny Edwardian ‘palaces’ could not quell the Strand’s ongoing affinity with the everyman. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the Strand became more cosmopolitan than ever. Headlines from French and Belgian newspapers were cried on it, and one evening journal was issued in Flemish. Offices were set up on east Strand to support Belgian refugees, and a Prisoners of War Information Bureau opened on Wellington Street.
In the years up to 1720, the Strand saw itself becoming built up as never before, with the construction of many-storeyed dwellings. The Strand’s three churches defined its importance in the early decades of the century: St Clement Danes at its eastern end, St Martin in the Fields at its west end and St Mary le Strand standing between them. The Sissons and Dollonds were two of the many families of Strand-side specialists operating businesses whose trade and shops gave the neighbourhood its vitality. The Strand’s troublesomeness became as notorious as its renown for cosmopolitan shine and sociability. Having harboured foremost cartographers and artists in the seventeenth century, the Strand became a printmaking centre in the eighteenth century. Following the French Revolution in 1789 and subsequent war with France, the next quarter century saw growing tensions, including domestic challenges, which affected the public mood.
The Strand erupted into loud cheers, whistles and yells as word spread of the announcement made by the King from Buckingham Palace that peace had been signed at Versailles. The Strand’s pre-eminence in radio transmission and its leadership in improving and elaborating communication in the wireless age also boosted its importance. By the 1930s, striking features punctuated the Strand’s western end. Art Deco/Moderne style was in vogue, especially with cinemas, which promoted the Hollywood aesthetic. With the Strand having survived the Zeppelin raids of the Great War largely intact, some might have believed that it would survive further aerial assault. Black-out orders darkened the Strand, making it again a street of ‘dreadful night’, lit only by the inferno brought to it by waves of Luftwaffe bombers. From September 1940, London became the chief, almost the exclusive, target of a relentless series of raids by German bombers.
Stretching less than a mile along the Thames’s northern shoreline, the Strand and its parishes comprise several connected but distinct villages, each with its own identity. The Strand has worn many faces as power has shifted from Church to aristocracy and to commerce and law. The story of this Strand and its inhabitants has been brought into focus by the growth since the 1990s of databases of contemporary records rich in millions of names, personalities and stories, the fruit of digitisation of newspapers, as well as state and parish records relating to rites of passage, taxation, trade, property and crime. The wars of the twentieth century left the Strand’s physical fabric largely intact but, amid Britain’s many postwar economic problems, from the 1970s it entered into a period of visible decline, just as Covent Garden and other parts of the West End became more popular.
The Strand was categorised in a mid-tenth-century charter as a ‘waste place’, and even at the time of the compilation in 1086 of the Norman inventories of landholdings called the Domesday Book it remained comparatively rural and undeveloped: the manor of Westminster lists nineteen villeins and forty-two cottars (both classes of serf), and twenty-five houses belonging to knights or Abbey staff. The Strand’s parishes reflected the intense religiosity of medieval society, and they profoundly shaped life in the Strand. The late medieval period shaped the fundamental character of the Strand. The medieval Strand was lined with grand south-facing mansions, the urban residences of the country’s bishops, who made the road a centre of political power. The medieval period, then, profoundly shaped the history of the Strand, as the time when its name, dimensions and parish boundaries were established.
London extended and spread out, and by 1841 had grown to a metropolis of over 2.2 million inhabitants. More traffic travelled through the Strand and wended through its intricate alleys, lanes and passages. Standards of medical training had been very variable and so were tightened in the first half of the nineteenth century. The British Medical Association pushed for regulation and to raise medicine to the status of a profession (resulting in the Medical Health Act 1858). Population growth in urban constituencies resulted in their redistribution ahead of the 1885 general election. Up to now, the Strand had been the responsibility of several parishes, governed by different vestries. The formation of the London County Council followed in 1889. London gained a municipal government elected directly by London’s householders and responsible for building controls, fire safety, drainage, housing and education. A new chapter would begin for the Strand.
The Strand was at the outset of London’s post-Roman history the link connecting Westminster and the City of London and it remains the backbone of the capital. An archetype of urban advancement, it has today been redesigned with a new green park at its east end. The Strand’s parishes reflected the intense religiosity of medieval society. Having harboured foremost cartographers and artists in the seventeenth century, the Strand became a printmaking centre in the eighteenth century. Standards of medical training had been very variable and so were tightened in the first half of the nineteenth century. The celebrities associated with its latest palaces continually stoked Edwardian impressions of the Strand once again being a ‘golden mile’. At one time a mile-long art gallery and museum, the Strand was put on the world stage to make treaties in a new age of exploration and amid broken religious promises.
The 1950s began unprepossessingly for a drab and war-damaged Strand. The European Service of BBC overseas radio broadcasting - which began in 1938 - relocated to Bush House in 1941, where it was joined by other services and remained until 2012. Proposals for large-scale changes to the Strand in fact pre-dated the war - not least the speculative designs of the architect Maxwell Fry that envisaged the comprehensive demolition of buildings between the Strand and river and their replacement by a forest of tower blocks. The Strand continued to hold a place in popular culture and society, though this frayed from the 1960s onwards. The Strand began a downward spiral as early as 1951, when it was described by the historian H. V. Morton as a ‘slightly shabby street’ that had ‘lost its gaiety and also its air of richness’.