HISTORY ON THE THAMES

600 AD – The Emporium

When the Romans abandoned Londinium around 410, the old city fell into ruin. When in mid-5th century the Saxons arrived, they instead chose a place a mile up river, the curve of the Thames as the place to found their new settlement. This was Lundenwic, a market and port that flourished.
The monk Bede, writing in the 8th century, called it “an emporium of many peoples coming from land and sea.” The foreshore between today’s 180 The Thames and Charing Cross was crowded with boats and trade.

1400 – The Golden Mile

The river was power. Its banks became the front gardens of the realm’s great families. Here rose the estates of Peter II, Duke of Savoy, the Duke of Somerset, and Sir William Cecil, chief minister to Elizabeth I.
The stretch was dubbed The Golden Mile – a display of rank and splendour running along the water’s edge.

1604 – The Collector Earl

The site of today’s 180 Quarter once held the London seat of the Earls of Arundel. The earldom, high in the English nobility – just below duke, above viscount – passed in 1604 to Thomas Howard.
Howard and his wife Alethea Talbot travelled through Europe, collecting art and antiquities. Their gallery rivalled the treasures of Charles I. Howard bought works by Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Dyck. He counted Rubens as a friend. Samuel Pepys came to admire the collection.The sculptures and fragments of Greece and Rome became known as the Arundel Marbles.

It was on display in Arundel House and its Italianate riverside gardens. It faced two ways. One grand entrance faced the Thames, and thus the navigable world, and another The Strand, running behind. For a time, this was London’s most refined address.

1750 – Reason, Romance, Spectacle

In 1750, Canaletto, the Venetian painter, came to London. From the terrace of nearby Somerset House, a hundred yards upstream from 180 The Thames, he painted the river as if it were Venice, its surface crowded with boats, its banks lined with the city’s gentry.
Soon after, Somerset House was rebuilt as London’s first purpose-built office block, home to government departments and the Navy Board, its grand façade turned towards the river.

Arundel House was redeveloped into a grid of streets with townhouses for the new intellectual, artistic and business classes: Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived on the newly created Norfolk Street.

On the river’s edge, the Adam Brothers built the Adelphi, a great terrace of townhouses, soon filled with the great actors of the age.

1850 – Print, Power, Performance

To the east, Fleet Street roared with printing presses. At 180 Strand, just behind the river, W.H. Smith opened its great circulating library, one of the largest in Britain, feeding the appetite of a literate middle class.

By the 19th century, the Strand had become London’s cultural corridor: theatres, exhibitions, fairs, the Savoy Theatre and, in 1889, the dazzling Savoy Hotel, built beside the river with electric light blazing. A little further along, William Waldorf Astor raised his mock-Gothic palace. Oscar Wilde drifted through the streets.

1900 – The Electric Age

The Strand carried London into the modern world.
At King’s College London, just opposite, James Clerk Maxwell had drawn the equations that bound light, electricity, and magnetism into a single theory. He had shown that unseen waves filled space. Half a century later, engineers proved him right, when they managed to transmit wireless signals, which would underpin the digital age.

But first came radio. In 1922, the first broadcasts of the BBC went out from Marconi House, on the Strand facing Somerset House. The voices of the new century announced itself to the city and with the advent of the BBC World Service, around the globe. “This is London,” became a signature of trust.

2025 – The Renaissance

In the last two decades, this quarter has become a centre for culture, technology, and food. Somerset House has transformed from government offices, into a hub for contemporary art and fashion, its courtyard hosting installations, ice rinks, and open-air concerts.

Along the Strand and its side streets, internationally recognised restaurants including Toklas and Ikoyi, both at 180. Vogue has called it xxx.

At 180 Strand, the building behind 180 The Thames, 180 Studios now hosts global exhibitions of film, art, and design. It has made it one of the city’s most striking creative venues.

The area has also become home to global technology firms and media businesses, whose offices line the redeveloped blocks. Universities expand their campuses here, including King’s College, the LSE and NYU’s London campus.

Once it was earls and bishops, then poets and actors, then broadcasters. Now it is artists, students, chefs, and technologists. The Strand is alive again. The Thames flows past as it always has, constant, carrying the city forward.