Leave Embankment station, step on to the pavement by the Golden Jubilee Bridge and cast your mind back 2,000 years. The Thames was wider then. You would have been at its edge, maybe with wet feet.
Turn left into Victoria Embankment Gardens, created in 1874 soon after Sir Joseph Bazalegette built the Embankment itself. They bloom with tulips in spring. Walk through, then head east on Watergate Walk, bisecting the al fresco tables of Gordon’s Wine Bar, which claims to be London’s oldest. At the end, head north through the slabbed walkway George Court and, after passing the LGBTQ+ Retro Bar, climb steps and emerge on one of London’s most world famous streets.
Strand, if we’re being official, the Strand if we’re calling it what everyone calls it, once formed part of the Roman route between Londinium and Silchester. Today’s name derives from “strond”, the Old English word for beach or shore.
A “strondway” appears in records from the year 1002, by which time Vikings and Anglo-Saxons vied for the territory. It was later called “Stronde” and “la Stranda”. During the 13th century, part of it was named “Densemanestret” because of all the local Danes.
Standing on its central pedestrian refuge strip, look east, admire the ornate lampposts and contemplate the Strand’s role in linking the capital’s financial and political cores, the City and Westminster, for hundreds of years. Forming the southern boundary of Covent Garden, it’s also long been an avenue of entertainment and more. Ahead, landmarks await.
At 409-412 Strand stands the art deco Adelphi theatre, bought by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s company in 1993. Three different playhouses previously stood on the site. The first opened in 1806 as Sans Pareil (“without compare”) but was soon renamed after the Adelphi Buildings, a block of grand terraced houses across the road that stretched down to the river.
They were developed by the Adam siblings from Scotland – Robert, John and James (“Adelphi” is the Greek word for brothers). The houses were replaced in the 1930s by the imposing Adelphi office building, these days home to the Economist magazine. The brothers are also honoured by the streets that bound the site – John Adam Street, Adam Street and Robert Street.
There’s another theatre at 404 Strand on the same side as the Adelphi – the Vaudeville, dating from 1870. Almost next door to it at 399, Stanley Gibbons, the home of postage stamp collecting, has had its headquarters for more than a century.
Nearly opposite stands Eighty Strand, also known as Shell Mex House after the oil business based there until the 1990s. Opened in 1932, its most famous feature faces the other way – a giant clock, apparently once known as “Ben Benzene”, that looks out across the Thames.
Next door is the Savoy Hotel, the last word in luxury but historically an add-on to the Savoy theatre, opened in 1881, where impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte put on the comic operas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. A plaque on Carting Lane records that the theatre was “the first public building in the world to be lit throughout by electricity”. Nearby, find a further example of Victorian enlightenment – London’s last surviving sewer-powered gas lamp.
Funded by the theatre’s proceeds, the hotel, designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt, admitted its first guests in 1889. Others have included luminaries of the arts and entertainment, ranging from Claude Monet to Judy Garland, to Australian opera singer Nellie Melba, who inspired a dessert, to Bob Dylan, whose famous film for Subterranean Homesick Blues was shot on the Savoy Steps alley to the rear.
Head down Savoy Hill, swing left into Savoy Place and meet a statue of Michael Faraday outside the Institute of Electrical Engineers. You are now close to Waterloo Bridge. A decision by music hall performer Harry Castling and composer Charles William Murphy not to cross it but to instead “go down the Strand” inspired their famous song about the street, first performed in the 1890s and popular long after.
Apparently, the pair had just left the Lyceum, a theatre with origins in the 1760s and by that time grandly rebuilt following a fire. Soon after, in 1904, it was rendered still more lavish. Yet it narrowly escaped post-war demolition before becoming a rock music venue, closing again in 1986 and being revived ten years later to ravishingly endure at the Wellington Street-Strand junction.
Continuing east, enter Aldwych, meaning “old port”, the core of 7th century Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic. Here, the Strand has been transformed by pedestrianisation, a project finished late in 2022.
To the left, the Grade II listed Bush House dominates. Once the base of the BBC World Service and the Inland Revenue, it now forms part of the King’s College Strand campus. To the right, there’s more of King’s and and there’s Somerset House, a cultural complex that has just survived a fire whose contents include the Courtauld art gallery, with its impressionist treasures, and the last substantial remnants of an earlier Strand era.
Once, the Strand’s entire south side length was lined with the mansions of bishops and aristocrats, living a short commute by boat from the courts of the Tudors and the wealth of the Square Mile. Somerset House was the home of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and brother-in-law of Henry VIII.
Pedestrianisation has rescued two English baroque churches from roundabouts. St Clement Danes, of 9th century descent, possibly founded by Danes, took its current form in 1682 thanks to Christopher Wren. Its bells may or may not be those mentioned in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons. The statues outside of wartime chiefs Dowding and Harris indicate its latter day link with the Royal Air Force.
Further on, at the Strand’s eastern end, St Mary le Strand was controversial with some when completed by James Gibbs in 1717 but its lavish interior is now revered. Just beyond St Mary’s stand the Royal Courts of Justice. And soon the Strand meets Westminster’s border with the City and becomes Fleet Street instead.
Much more could written, not least of the Strand’s cast of distinguished ghosts, such as John Chapman who published the radical Westminster Review from there, such as the Aldwych ghost station and such as the India Club, which closed its doors and restaurant only last year having barely changed since it was founded in 1951.
The tides of London history continue flowing through the Strand. After all, it did used to be a beach.
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