Strand Stories: A Walking Tour

With Geoff Browell and Arved Kirschbaum.

Two back-to-back walking tours of the Strand Campus and the Maughan Library in Chancery Lane. Highlights will include the beautiful College Chapel and the East Wing of Somerset House, and the famous round reading room of the Victorian College Library.

Geoff Browell

Geoff leads on collaboration, partnerships and fundraising for King’s Libraries & Collections. Formerly Head of Archives, for more than a decade he was responsible for internationally-valuable collections including records of modern warfare, science, medicine and the arts and led many digital projects notably setting up and managing King’s digital asset management system, digitisation and digital and other innovation including plays, musical concerts and numerous physical and virtual exhibitions. His remit includes supporting King’s Foyle Special Collections, that among many highlights houses the exemplary Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Historical Collection spanning four hundred years of diplomacy, empire and economy. An archivist and historian, he recently co-authored The Strand: A Biography (2024, MUP), the first ever history of the street that King’s calls home.

Geoff has led many tours of the Strand campus, including using extended reality to bring stories to life and is co-founder of XRchiving, a pan European group that organises conferences and workshops and develops standards around the use of augmented and virtual reality in the heritage sector. He recently completed team work on a mammoth 3D scan of London’s medieval Guildhall and is helping to build Digital Roman London. The next XRchiving conference in the autumn will highlight the hardware, software and human factors of immersive storytelling including novel blending of 3D and AI and memory twins.

Geoff is also Chair of AIM25, a charitable consortium of 150 of London’s archives including learned societies, medical colleges, universities, museums and galleries. He holds a PhD in early modern ideas, is an IHR convenor, a Freeman of the City of London and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is co-host of the podcast, Time Table London, interviewing interesting people in London’s pubs.

Arved Kirschbaum

Arved’s job is to raise awareness of the King’s library’s resources, collections, and facilities – this last part you will get to enjoy. He has a passion for London’s local history and how it connects to the wider world, which makes him feel very fortunate to have an office in what is now the Maughan Library, but was once the Public Record Office [now know as the National Archives] – a building sitting on a site that leads us back in time to the 13th century and dark choices made by English Kings that have a disturbingly modern resonance in this age of disinformation.

Arved joined King’s College London in 2021, having previously worked in library reading list support at the University of Durham and the library cataloguing department of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He holds degrees in Classics from Durham University and Library Management from Sheffield University.

• Make an appointment to visit the King’s College London Foyle Special Collections Library.

• You can also schedule an appointment in the King’s College London Archives on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

• Check out our Digital Collections full of stories told and waiting to be told.

• Geoff’s book “The Strand: A Biography” is available at all good bookshops and via online retailers.