ABSTRACT
In London, in 1873, a stroller along one block on the north side of the Strand between Newcastle Street and Drury Court would have passed in sequence The Universe newspaper office; Andrew Leonard, tobacconist; Joseph Hitchcock, bootmaker; Gilbert Noble, bookseller; Mary Thick, dressmaker; the Reynold’s newspaper office; Leon Levy, clothier; Thomas Dark’s Oxford Stores; John Priest’s dining rooms; Henry Vicker’s, publisher – all small, independent businesses. The experience of the same stroller, walking the length of the Strand twenty-seven years later, in 1900, would have been markedly different. The block no longer existed, swept away by the monumental architecture of the Kingsway and Aldwych, a project that had also destroyed the centre of the Victorian pornography industry in Holywell Street (Nead 2000). At numbers 14, 132, 149, 263, 294, 355 and 407 the Strand, he or she would have passed an ABC (Aerated Bread Company) teashop, and at numbers 35 and 154, a Lyons teashop. By 1890 there were already over fifty ABCs in central London. The first Lyons opened in 1894, and they spread rapidly to cover the same area.
