It’s been four years since the stars aligned on an ancient London thoroughfare called the Strand. A traffic diversion, a designated island, a deft landscaping plan and an outdoor art programme resulted in a 170-metre car-free swath where tens of thousands of people walk, gather and lounge every day with views of Somerset House and two centuries-old steeples. LDA Design and Westminster City Council, who collaborated on the scheme, refer to the reclaimed space as a threshold for ‘a world-class cultural and learning quarter’.
Given the leeway to roam into what was formerly a four-lane road, many of those people have gained perspective on the streetscape. With a little distance, it’s easy to spot the terrace hemmed in by King’s College and Somerset House — five façades in five different styles going back more than 300 years. The street level windows are blacked out, but upstairs they wear the stains and scars of centuries on one of the city’s busiest routes, linking St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace. But whose are they, what are they, and what are they destined to be? Seems the Strand’s pedestrianised corridor was a rare effort in placemaking where most of the places are still unmade.
The Strand — or “Strand”, as it’s technically called — began as the foreshore, or strand, of London, and evolved from a Roman rat run into a Medieval riviera of sorts between the financial and political city. By the time numbers 152 to 158 were built, on five narrow medieval burgage plots, the row had been taken up by small business. A working community of tailors, locksmiths, booksellers, tobacconists, dentists and makers — of watches, buttons and umbrellas — flourished. As the neighbourhood got grander and more theatrical, these began their exodus. Numbers 152 to 158 were abandoned; King’s College acquired the freeholds nearly a century ago.
A slew of local activists coordinated a campaign to protect the terrace after the college applied to replace it with a contemporary building. In a rare U-turn, King’s struck a deal with Courtauld, the gallery and art college next door, to redevelop the houses into spaces for learning. Late last year they announced their plan: the façades will remain intact and behind them the townhouses will form a research centre, connected to the mothership at Somerset House.
After transforming the North Wing of the Grade I-listed Somerset House in 2021, architects from Witherford Watson Mann took on the job of overhauling the terrace and uniting it with the main Courtauld. The Stirling Prize-winning practice, in collaboration with Purcell and Lawson Ward Studio, will restore the historic façades and carve out modern classrooms and a new lecture theatre, plus a library within Somerset House’s historic subterranean vaults. The new campus will open directly onto the Strand. Work should be complete in 2029, well before the Courtauld turns 100 in 2032.
The project will secure the long-term future of the townhouses, a contextual link between the baroque church St Mary-Le-Strand to one end and St Clement Danes to the other, designed by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. Once complete, the folks at Courtauld say, this quarter mile of Strand will bridge a ‘lively new public realm said to rival Trafalgar Square‘. This is hardly hyperbole considering the cultural offering at 180 Quarter down the road, with its rotating galleries, reading room and new Thames-facing restaurants — not to mention the revitalised Savoy and general scrubbing up of the Thames.
Still there’s something elegant in the interim view, of a terrace in sepia tones left unscrubbed and unheralded. The project will safeguard them for the long term, yet something about them will inevitably be lost.
