Explore the New Strand Aldwych and discover digital content about people and events from the past, written into statues, grade 1 listed buildings and West End theatres.
Inspired by the City of London’s vision to transform one of the busiest roads into a new pedestrianised destination, to showcase the extraordinary wealth of culture and heritage in the area, Hexology has curated a collection of stories and posted them into physical locations for people to discover and explore the new #StrandAldwych area.
Explore the New #StrandAldwych
The Strand runs along the Northbank from Trafalgar Square to Temple Bar. At the East end, Aldwych is the name of a semi-circular street and the area surrounding it. Where the Strand & Aldwych intersect lies an island in the shape of a half-moon crescent. Situated in front of the historic Somerset House, Courtauld Gallery, King’s College and St Mary Le Strand Church, this pretty little sanctuary is loaded with history.
St. Mary Le Strand Church
Canon Peter Babington, the Priest at the St Mary Le Strand Church says that London bus drivers used to call the Church, St Mary-in-the-way, as it was literally located between two lanes of fast-moving traffic. Crazy to think that this pretty little church, which, unlike St Clement Danes Church had survived the Blitz, and due to it’s Italian (Catholic) Architectural influence had caused so much controversy, has in fact been closed and is now in need of restoration.
West End Theatre
Then there are stories about West End Theatres, some rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666, some shaped by Tudor politics. The commercial successes and failures of theatre-owners and their producers over hundreds of years, have created a legacy that is so interesting it puts the evolution of the City of London into context.
Hexology is a platform that empowers you to post digital content into objects, spaces and places, enabling you to bring all of your stories to the surface. In Strand Aldwych, the people who live, work or are visiting the area are now able to discover this layer of digital information, written into the world around them.
Using Keywords to build a World Wiki
Keywords which start with a #hashtag have been written into the text and one is pressed, Hexology compiles and opens a collection of posts which includes the same #hashtag. So if I press the #hashtag #SomersetHouse inside the app, I’ll discover other posts that share the same hashtag, which have been written into the world around me.
Here is a link to a collection of posts that includes the keyword #StrandAldwych. Open this link on your phone to view the collection in the app https://links.hexology.co/tag/strandaldwych
All this is discoverable when you install Hexology, which also empowers you to generate QR codes for display. There are lots of ways to integrate Hexology into cities, public sites, heritage venues and visitor attractions. Working in collaboration with you, importing batch content to Hexology is possible via your existing datasets such as JSON, XML, CSV, etc.
So the next time you are in London, you might decide to explore the new #StrandAldwych. Imagine how you might use Hexology to place your stories into the world around you!
