Famous people
Strand Lines
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 »
Crowds watching the Duke of Wellington's funeral procession on 18 November 1852 - no-one now on top of St Mary's (Illustrated London News 27 November 1852, 472)
In the 1720s, Mrs Holt's Italian Warehouse (a warehouse was a sort of 18th-century department store) in the Strand opposite Exeter Change. According to the trade card that William Hogarth engraved for her, she stocked Read more »
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 »
A few doors down from the Adelphi is the pretty building which houses the Vaudeville Theatre.Built in 1870, Henry Irving acted on this stage for a while, as Ronald Bergan's book The Great Theatres of London tells us.
Vaudeville Theatre today.
Interior of the newly-opened Vaudeville Theatre in 1870. Westminster Archives Centre.
