The Strand has many of the ingredients of a great London street: the Savoy Hotel and Somerset House, theatres, churches, universities, the river just behind it and Trafalgar Square at one end.

For years, it also had the atmosphere of somewhere between more interesting places. It is a road of handsome stonework at first-floor level and disappointing decisions below it, where convenience shops, luggage, fast food and interchangeable restaurants have served a passing population without giving many of them a reason to stop.

But over the last few years, that has changed. Whether it is Soho House’s 180 Strand branch, Nick Jones’s new hotel St Clement or the silver carvings, trolleys are moving through Simpson’s in the Strand once again. This long-abandoned stretch in the heart of London is becoming the capital’s chi-chi mile.

It is difficult to imagine a more convincing advertisement for the Strand’s revival than Jeremy King’s reopening of Simpsons on the Strand. The restaurateur who helped turn the Wolseley, the Ivy and Le Caprice into stages on which London could watch itself eating, has taken on a restaurant that first opened as a chess and coffee club in 1828. Simpson’s was once famous for cutting meat tableside so lunch would not interrupt the players. By the time it closed during the pandemic, its history had become both its chief attraction and its greatest difficulty: the trolley kept rolling, but the city had moved on without it.

King reopened it in March with the Grand Divan joined by Romano’s, Simpson’s Bar, Nellie’s Tavern and a ballroom, preserving the theatre while attempting to remove the museum dust. Step outside and the transformation of a street known for being a parade of chains is well underway. The Strand is becoming a destination once again.

This is, in one sense, a return to factory settings. The road developed as the link between the City and Westminster, but its importance was never solely practical. Medieval palaces and great houses once stood along its southern edge, their gardens running down to the Thames.

When aristocratic London drifted west, coffee houses, chop houses, taverns, theatres and music halls moved in. By the end of the 19th century, the Strand was renowned for restaurants, pubs and entertainment. It was not simply a route across London but a place where London happened.

Food was woven through that life. Simpson’s began with coffee and chess. The Savoy later brought hotel dining on a scale and polish that established the area as a place for occasion, spectacle and expense. The theatres supplied the rhythm: early dinners, interval drinks, late suppers and the business of finding a table before curtain-up.

A modern developer might call it an all-day, mixed-use hospitality district. Londoners simply called it the Strand.

Its decline was less dramatic than attritional. Bomb damage and postwar redevelopment removed or altered much of the old residential fabric. Traffic thickened between the West End and the City. Large office and institutional buildings turned long stretches inward, with life happening in lobbies, lecture halls and private rooms rather than on the pavement.

The Strand retained its major names but lost the connective tissue between them. Simpson’s, the Savoy and Somerset House remained destinations; the street outside became something to endure on the way there. The office economy covered some of this up. Office workers needing coffee at eight, sandwiches at one and a train home at six can keep a street busy without making it interesting. The economics favoured operators able to take large units and process customers quickly.

Independent shops and more ambitious restaurants faced the harder task of persuading people to visit a place designed to move them along.

Covid exposed the weakness. When office workers stayed home, the automatic trade disappeared. A strategy commissioned by the Northbank business improvement district found substantial vacant floor space and a declining retail offer, with traditional shops giving way to convenience and casual grab-and-go food.

In 2023, Westminster City Council, Transport for London, the BID and property owners formed a taskforce to devise a five-year plan from Trafalgar Square to Lancaster Place. Its remedies included a leasing adviser to curate the tenant mix, more alfresco dining, pop-ups in empty units and events designed to increase the planning profession’s favourite commodity: dwell time.

The vocabulary is faintly comic. After centuries of coffee houses, taverns and supper rooms, the Strand was to be saved by the language of activation and linked experiences. Yet the diagnosis was sound. A street cannot live on workers buying salads at their desks. It needs people with nowhere more pressing to be.

The eastern end had already shown what changing the physical street could do. The £22m Strand Aldwych scheme, launched in December 2022, removed traffic from the section outside Somerset House and King’s College London and created a 7,000 sq m public space with planting, seating and event spaces. A road junction became somewhere one might plausibly sit with a coffee. One part of the Strand began asking pedestrians to remain rather than get out of the way.

Restaurants have become the means by which that promise is being filled. Somerset House now has six permanent food and drink businesses as well as seasonal pop-ups. Alongside the late Skye Gyngell’s Spring are Aram, Imad Alarnab’s eastern Mediterranean restaurant, Amy Poon’s first permanent Poon’s, the plant-first Cafe Petiole and Setlist, a riverside bar combining food, music and art.

This is landlord curation in its most flattering form: recognisable cooks and distinct ideas rather than the safest tenant willing to sign the lease.

A few minutes east, 180 Strand is pursuing the same objective on a large and more private scale. The brutalist complex has gradually assembled its own ecosystem: the members’ club 180 House (a branch of Soho House), Jeremy Chan’s Ikoyi, Toklas restaurant and bakery and Corner Shop 180, a grocer, cafe, bakery and wine bar designed for people who consider buying olive oil a leisure activity.

Now it has St Clement, Nick Jones’s first independent hotel project since leaving Soho House. The hotel began opening in June with Cafe Clement, an all-day European restaurant led by Danny Bohan. Bobbi’s Bar supplies the late-night element, while Lunette, the rooftop restaurant from Florence Knight, is due in September.

Together with the hotels, apartments, club, studios and wellness spaces, it is less a single opening than an attempt to manufacture a neighbourhood inside the development – breakfast, work, dinners, drinks and bed without confronting the Strand’s less curated stretches. There are smaller signs of change between the flagships. Le Nusa has brought contemporary Indonesian cooking to 227-288 Strand. Opposite Charing Cross station, the Stranded pub pairs beer with Liu Xiaomian’s Chongqing noodles. Osteria del Mare has taken a conspicuous corner site at 366 Strand.

The Strand is not suddenly Soho, with small operators accumulating until a neighbourhood magically appears. Its revival is being engineered by people with deep pockets, famous names and the ability to curate who gets through the door.

Perhaps that is the only plausible model for a street of enormous buildings, high rents and fragmented ownership. It is also why the new Strand should not be declared finished too soon. A destination restaurant can draw people from across London, but it cannot make the walk from Charing Cross feel less like a sequence of obstacles.

A rooftop bar can keep guests out until 3am, but it does not automatically create a night-time economy at street level. The test will be whether the glamour leaks out: whether smaller businesses follow, empty shops fill and people begin to use the Strand not just as an address on a booking confirmation but as a place to wander before and after it.

Back at Simpson’s, the trolley is doing what it has done for almost two centuries, carrying lunch through a room built to make lunch feel important. Outside, the Strand is still rough around the edges and perhaps better for not being wholly polished.

It does not need to become another Mayfair or a theme park of reconstructed London glamour. It needs only to recover the principle on which its old life depended: that a great street should give you reasons to arrive early, stay late and, occasionally, miss your train home.