Fleet Street Memories

There used to be The City Golf Club in an ancient lane leading down to St Bride's Church, off Fleet Street. Of course, it was just a members' drinking club in the times when the Fleet Street boozers were closed to the Fourth Estate in the afternoons.

There was also, strangely, a golf shop in New Bridge Street too. Don't forget that Blackheath was (is, although relocated), the first golf club in England. The City Golf Club was a members' only boozing club with walls decorated with (token) old hickory-shafted clubs and wot-not -just like the old Wig & Pen: a refuge for all-day Fleet Street topers (who worked between 8-00 am and 11-00 am), until El Vino's re-opened in the evening, for its short hours, and then it was off to: The Wine Press; The Printer's Pie; Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese; The Bell; The King & Keys; The Tipperary How could I forget the Tipperary! Guinness and Green King IPA and those Beaujolais Nouveau breakfasts. The hours that I spent in there. There was also The Popinjay (the old 'firing' pub - if a journo was taken in there by his editor, it was sacking time, apparently); The Punch: The Cock; all ending up at Spaghetti Opera (an Italian restaurant which employed opera singers to entertain); The Temple Bar Tandoori (one of the best Indian restaurants in London); The George, or Daly's. Ah! I remember it well! All long before that pretentious Olde Bank of England nonesense: these were places where you went to get slaughtered. And if you weren't slaughtered by the time that your bladder-bursting frame got off the homeward conveyance, then, unless you were "Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid", you were definitely slaughtered just as you walked through your own front door. On one occasion it was a hatpin and, on another, a carving knife in the arm, which, besides necessitating a couple of stitches, more irritatingly, totalled a perfectly good hopsack suit.

Was ever an area better served for pubs? I am sure that it has all changed but it probably isn't just because the journos and printers have gone so much as because of changes in attitudes: the insidious, increasing, puritanical up-tightness of modern Britain: getting hammered even just on Fridays; maybe getting hammered at all, is probably a disciplinary offence now, let alone getting hammered and then disappearing in a thick, blue cloud of Turkish tobacco smoke! All the light-heartedness of working life has gone and been replaced by a Cromwellian bleakness and dutifulness, well, apparent dutifulness. They'll never know that there is no better state to write up a piece with a bit of a kick to it than three sheets to the wind: warm glow in the belly and trembling fingers, mind racing and coffee spilt.