by Tim Moore
But – and I know this is going to come as a bludgeoning shock – some time in the early eighteenth century, when the aristos began to move west away from the crime and stench of city centre life, the Strand lowered its sights. Its taverns had always attracted wrong ’uns – the Gunpowder Plot was hatched in a Strand pub – and now their keepers were hiring strippers, or even luring ‘buggerantoes’ to what were the capital’s first gay bars. Playing-car manufacturers set up in the narrow edifices that now crowded the Strand, and muggers battered their victims to its potholed pavements ‘at no later hour than eight o’clock at night’. Johnson’s mate Boswell picked up most of his many tarts along the Strand, and once shagged one from behind on Westminster Bridge. If he’d kept it going for forty years that ‘earth hath not anything to show more fair’ ode dedicated by Wordsworth to the relevant Thames-spanning structure would have made an inestimably more captivating O level test.
Still happy-go-lucky but now slightly more wholesome, approaching the Victorian age the Strand became the home of London’s first public zoo, opened in fact by the brother of Great Marlborough Street’s corpse-o-rama. The Exeter Change menagerie regularly paraded its choicer attractions up and down the Strand, a practice that rebounded in 1826 when an elephant ran amok. The extent of the ensuing panic may be imagined from the beast’s subsequent post-mortem, during which surgeons extracted parts of a cannonball, a broken spear tip and no less than 152 bullets.
Shortly after, the street’s west end was tarted up as part of the Trafalgar Square makeover, which when finished moved Disraeli to hail the Strand as ‘perhaps the finest street in Europe’ (yes – there we go again). Charles Lamb went even further, claiming that the street’s ‘multitude of life’ regularly moved him to tears.
But the Strand’s golden age was the Edwardian, when as London’s premier good-time promenade it boasted restaurants, hotels, pubs and more theatres than any other street in the capital. The ghost Tube station that is now Aldwych was opened in 1907 as Strand, running a special late-night ‘Theatre Train’ that connected with the main Piccadilly line. More so even than Leicester Square the Strand was London’s music-hall mecca, celebrated not only in the verses to ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’ but as the lyrical stamping ground of ‘Burlington Bertie’, who walked up the Strand with his gloves on his hand, and walked down again with them off. It even made it into a title, commemorated in ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand’, a number whose immortality is ensured by the popular habit of inserting the phrase ‘have a banana’ in any pause between lines. Respectful of its heritage and flying fearlessly in the face of current standards of aesthetic acceptability, the Players Theatre on the Strand continues to run a Good Old Days vaudeville experience.
My mistake, one whose shocking enormity had come groggily into focus as I shivered out of in-car hibernation, was not experiencing at first hand the Strand’s thirties speciality – the huge luxury hotel. I’d booked myself a table at the Savoy for lunch, but how much more civilised to have transformed that Fleet Street sortie into a bracing dawn stroll between long sessions of pampered slumber. Wearily trumping an obstructed van driver’s single raised finger with two of my own as I laboriously manoeuvred the car into a meter bay round the back of the Savoy, I realised that by the time parking charges had been accounted for I wouldn’t even have saved much.
Recklessly recharged by a queasy surfeit of Charing Cross station doughnuts, I began my trip down the Strand (have a banana) as Vic and Marge would surely have done, back up at the Trafalgar Square end.
The homely country-town high-street atmosphere that so tickled Disraeli has clearly been diluted by a Clunn-chuffing road widening scheme that during thirty-three years of typically faltering endeavour demolished almost everything on the Strand’s southern flank by 1934. It’s still easy, though, to take in the motley vigour that made Charles Lamb weep: in the foreground two squat, plump Nash-era towers – in the thirties Barclays but now Jigsaw – bursting like a tart’s cleavage from their Georgian bodice; on the distant horizon St Mary-le-Strand, a Baroque needle threaded up between four furious lanes of traffic. And in between, bullied by the beefy office blocks but still holding out, a sort of medley of the Strand’s greatest hits: a couple of theatres, a couple of hotels, a couple of pubs.
Assessing the Strand’s appeal in the early thirties, Professor C.H. Reilly proved himself a lot cannier than Harold Clunn: ‘It is essentially the London we love, and the stream of red omnibuses, taxi-cabs and carts, which congest it as a thoroughfare, all add appropriate life to its multicoloured, many materialed buildings. Even the advertisements with their sprawling lettering by day and the illuminated signs by night can do little damage to a muddled bazaar where you can not only buy clothes and boots of every quality, but have your photograph taken at any time as a Red Indian or cowboy in ready-made fancy dress.’ Got that? At any time.
A tough act to follow, yet the Strand managed better than I’d expected. In terms of commercial and retail possibilities it runs the gamut, with more variety than any other street on the board. And this street has upheld its traditions better than most, too: of its thirties commercial themes only the fêted trinity of pawnbroking, dentistry and the manufacture of surgical instruments have been swept aside. Half the Strand’s six Lyons Corner Houses are still restaurants, and the Adelphi still projects its on-stage stars up and down the street in lights. Those cartoon Chinamen above the entrance to Twinings, the tea importers who have been paying rates to the borough of Westminster for longer than any other firm, are welcoming in customers as they have since 1706. There are still jewellers, still a Boots – along with pubs, London’s only reliable retail constant. Anyone not stupid enough to have packed their innards with fabric-flavoured doughnuts can still enjoy London’s finest breakfasts within the extravagantly mahoganied dining halls of Simpson’s-in-the-Strand – an establishment so stubbornly British that it banned the word ‘menu’ in favour of ‘bill of fare’. The travel agents and luggage emporia attracted, as with the Northumberland Avenue hotels, by Charing Cross station’s boat trains to the Continent maintain a stout presence, and still flying the flag for the dozen or so postage stamp dealers resident along the Strand in the thirties I was charmed and delighted to discover the continued residence of Stanley Gibbons and a less familiar rival.
This wasn’t so much because I’m interested in postage stamps – although I’m afraid I vaguely am – but because peering into their windows I noted the extent to which both outlets have diversified into the more broadly fascinating showbiz memorabilia market. Stanley was offering one of Johnny Rotten’s mohair scarves for £2,800 – almost what I’d have paid to see it looted by rioting poll-tax anarchists – but between the first-day covers and Penny Blacks over the road was an offer yet more shriekingly irresistible: a set of pewter Dalek salt and pepper shakers, complete with a signed photo of Tom Baker, all for £95.
Yet at the same time it was difficult to avoid the sensation that the Strand has been slightly neutered, that the street has become rather a jack of all the trades it once mastered. The muddled-bazaar/cowboy-photo end of the market has migrated to nearby Covent Garden, and, Dr Who cruet sets aside, most of the retail establishments offered little to the window shopper unmoved by the leisured perusal of staplers or bifocals. And the Gaiety Theatre has been tellingly usurped by the headquarters of Citibank plc.
The Strand’s atmosphere, even on the many occasions I’ve walked along it at night, always seems rather muted and downbeat, and standing at its halfway point, by the messy and turbulent junction with the Aldwych and Waterloo Bridge, I understood why. Behind me, sloping gently down to Trafalgar Square, the Strand’s northern side was still a pick-and-mix chorus line of three hundred years of architecture. But facing it across the traffic was the most humourless audience imaginable, a massed row of po-faced blocks. Harold Clunn, trying to pinpoint exactly what it was he despised about London’s higgledy-piggledy old frontages, and what he loved about their uniform, mon
olithic replacements, concluded that ‘the new buildings in the Strand made the old ones look as though they wanted a shave’. Regrettably, someone had passed the razor to Sweeney Todd.
I crossed the road deep in thought – an ill-chosen state of mind that elicited a volley of parps – and miraculously found myself in a bucolic oasis. To stand amidst the carefully tended geraniums and pansies in St Mary-le-Strand’s horseshoe-shaped and almost horseshoe-sized churchyard is to experience one of London’s more arcane pleasures. Its old iron railings enclose the condensed essence of a timelessly rural England, yet lean across that flagstoned path to sample the scent of a fragrant briar rose and if you’re not careful a bus might make off to New Cross with any prominent facial features. The only other time I have experienced such a sense of calm amidst chaos was standing on a ledge as a mighty Icelandic waterfall crashed down before me. One might imagine a spitefully mischievous deity – let’s call him Harold – plucking up a village church and dropping it in the M25’s central reservation.
Certainly not many brave the barrelling one-way onslaught. Inside, with the traffic roar filtered down to a watery hiss, I read that the church only holds three services a week. And the visitors’ book, by no means an unwieldy tome, went back eight years.
Back over the road, Somerset House was another rewarding discovery, but this was an oasis of such grand proportions that I couldn’t imagine how or why in all the times I’d walked past its gates I’d never once taken the trouble to saunter in. I’d seen it billed as the sole survivor of the Strand’s great mansions, but in fact the present stately buildings, arranged around an enormous and – ooooh – windily exposed square, were Britain’s first large-scale, purpose-built government offices, erected in the 1780s and for 140 years the headquarters of the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Now home to the Courtauld Institute’s rather wonderful art collection, Somerset House is a splendidly agreeable place in almost every way. You can have a cup of coffee in that expansive courtyard, perhaps flicking grains of Demerara sugar at the ice skaters pirouetting across the rink before you, or stroll through the river wing to the terrace overlooking the Thames and enjoy a glass of something cold, refreshing and wartinducingly overpriced (I did say almost every way).
But the Strand is very much a street of two halves, or in fact three thirds, and up from Aldwych it is squeezed into its colonial Establishment phase beneath the clean-shaven, slightly forbidding twenties bulk of the Australian and Indian high commissions and Bush House, now synonymous with the BBC’s World Service but built by American tycoon Irving Bush as a vast and extravagantly appointed trade centre.
Hailed at the time as the world’s most expensive building, Bush House saw its commercial dream rather soiled by the Depression, and its imposing marble-clad showrooms and leisure facilities were largely empty when the Post Office pension fund acquired the freehold. In 1940 the fund leased Bush House to what was then the BBC’s Empire Service: swimming pools and cinemas were converted into studios, and throughout the war the Service cemented a reputation as a trusted broadcaster. Today, with 120 million listeners and programming in thirty-eight languages, it remains one of the few British exports we can all be genuinely proud of – when Radio 5 Live’s commentator breaks off during a Saturday afternoon football match to announce that we’re now being joined by World Service listeners around the globe, some part of my soul is always stirred.
As well as the colossal sheep’s head over its front entrance, the Australian High Commission is otherwise notable for its visa section’s opening hours, these being 9a.m.–11a.m. Having posted my c.v. through the doors I circuited the second of the Strand’s central reservation places of worship, the heavily shrapnel-pitted RAF church of St Clement Danes, and beheld before me the Strand’s third third.
Recently sandblasted back to their late Victorian Gothic splendour, the Law Courts present a grand but suitably stern face to the Strand. I probably could have gone in – any building made up of sixty court rooms and thirty-five million bricks can only be a remarkable one – but it didn’t look as much fun as Somerset House, and after eight hours of wind-chilled pedestrian endeavour I somehow lacked the wherewithal to explain my Monopoly board to another bag-searching sobersides. After a quick tour of the engagingly archaic legal alleyways of Middle Temple – an area so ubiquitously peopled by the administrators of law that I passed three unmanned newspaper stands with honesty boxes – I turned on my worn-down heels and headed back.
Turning into Savoy Court and the eponymous hotel’s extravagantly chromed Deco entrance, the good news was that I had long since walked off those doughnuts: I’d fed the meter and now it was my turn. The bad news was that because my day had begun in an earlier life, and because the man who led that life was apparently a giant buttock, I had forgotten to wear a tie.
You can’t dine at the Savoy without a tie. This is a place that writes its own laws – the hotel’s carriage drive, Savoy Court, is the only thoroughfare in Britain in which motorists must keep to the right – and unlike the many-bricked edifice down the road it tolerates no appeal. As the maitre d’ glided up to me across the thick lobby carpet I hurriedly cloaked my incriminating neck and chest area with a hand and two photocopied images of the Strand of yesteryear. If I could evade detection long enough to whip a napkin into my collar, and then spend a lot of time minutely examining broad objects – first the menu, then my Monopoly board – I might possibly get away with it.
‘Good afternoon,’ he announced in cultured tones spiced with the merest hint of Italian.
‘Table in the name of Moore,’ I grunted, chin to chest.
‘Certainly, sir.’ The tiniest pause. ‘May I offer to lend you one of our ties?’
I smiled like the R. White’s secret lemonade drinker caught at the fridge by his wife: a foolish, feeble, don’t-hit-me smile. Casually arranged in the heady aftermath of my power breakfast at the Ritz – my free power breakfast at the Ritz – this solo Savoy lunch was now laid bare for what it was: an indulgent, vainglorious pomposity, one for which I was already being punished in more ways than one. Shepherd’s pie was listed on the menu outside the Grill Room as the day’s speciality, but the pricing of even this utilitarian dish at £18.50 had briefly effected reverse-thrust doughnut action.
Of the grand Strand hotels, the Savoy is the only survivor. The Strand Palace, though still very much alive, had never in fact placed itself in the top tier: part of the J. Lyons Corner House empire, it sought, as did its catering brethren, to offer a wing-collar experience at blue-collar prices. But grand it certainly appeared, at least until a Clunn-style shave in the late sixties: how the proprietors must hate visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the wondrous Deco entrance they discarded so eagerly has been painstakingly reassembled. Today the Strand Palace exudes a sort of Dralon dinner-dance suburbanity: you wouldn’t catch the Savoy advertising a £14 carvery on a board out the front.
At the time of its opening in 1896, the Cecil was Europe’s largest and most magnificent hotel, with six hundred rooms. Shortly before completion, regrettably, its proprietor went bankrupt and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison – in those days fraud and deception were taken seriously, and suicide was a regularly selected option for tycoons whose empires went belly up. The Cecil never recovered: ‘The building was demolished in the record time of sixteen weeks in the autumn of 1930,’ recounts Clunn, out-Clunning himself, ‘and a magnificent new twelve-storey building crowned by a massive stone clock tower has now been erected on this site by the Shell Mex Company.’
Much as I hate to agree with Harold, I’ve always been slightly in awe of Shell Mex House. A sort of musclebound Cenotaph with windows, it more or less demands respect from all beholders, still exuding that tremendous arrogance appropriate for the first corporate headquarters in London whose construction costs topped £1 million. Only with hindsight at the weedily parodic commercial structures that Shell Mex House later inspired can its name be taken in vain: if Shell Mex House is
Elvis, then the sorry blocks around Fenchurch Street are all Shakin’ Stevens.
So anyway it’s just the Savoy these days, a hotel which hasn’t forgotten that Monsieur Ritz was its first manager and Monsieur Escoffier its first chef, but probably wished no one remembered the night in July 1923 when the Parisian wife of an Egyptian prince expressed her ennui for a marriage characterised by fierce arguments and enforced sodomy by fatally shooting him three times in one of the hotel’s grander suites.
Juries might have been tough on business fraud in those days, but they certainly weren’t on sodomised wives: accepting her barrister’s claim that the gun accidentally went off in her hands (three times?), they acquitted her. As a side issue it was also claimed in the trial that the prince had been enjoying a gay affair with his personal assistant, which I only mention so as to be able to wheel out Stephen Fry’s comment on arriving late for a press conference at a grand hotel: ‘Sorry, I was just upstairs in my suite – well, that’s what I call him, anyway.’
And before I return to my tieless humiliation, I’ve just got time to get some more retaliation in first: working undercover as a cleaner at the Savoy around the time of my visit, a Guardian journalist saw a mouse running into the staff kitchen, and a cockroach, and had to buy her own rubber gloves even though after deductions she was paid £2.69 an hour. Work through the night and she could have put a down-payment on a feuilleté of asparagus.