85 Fleet Street

This may be old hat to veterans, but I wondered if you knew that Punch magazine lived at 85 Fleet Street. Earlier this week I cruised through the Tate's latest exhibition, Rude Britannia, on cartoons and satire where an old Punch cover page of the 1880s listed its address as 85 Fleet Street. Perhaps its spirit stayed behind when the magazine was chucked out to make way for Lutyens’ monolith and the Baron. How else, I wonder, to explain the humour, satire and mischievous behaviour of many who passed through the edifice.

Punch, Or, the London Charivari - its full original title - was published from 1841 until 2002 with a hiatus from 1992 to 1996.

From 1843 to 1900 the Punch office was in a single-storey building at 85 Fleet Street, in the heart of London's blossoming journalistic empire. Here its writers and artists often composed their material, surrounded by the workplaces of the very professionals whose writings and deeds fuelled Punch's columns - the myriad newspaper offices on Fleet Street, the Middle and Inner Temples, the Apothecaries Hall, and the Royal College of Surgeons. From the windows of their office, Punch's early contributors watched the Lord Mayor's Show and other spectacles that took place on one of London's busiest thoroughfares, and then turned these displays into cartoons and commentaries. Many of these journalists learnt their trade in, or followed the examples of, the new cheap illustrated periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s which owed their success to their ability to re-present in comic form the funerals of monarchs, the processions of priests, stage dramas, displays of exotic species, exhibitions of new machines, illustrated scientific discourses, and a plethora of other sensations which drew the same London crowds who bought cheap periodicals.

Punch Tavern, 99 Fleet Street, was originally the Crown and Sugar Loaf but was renamed in the late 1840s because of its association with Punch magazine whose journalists frequented the pub. It was rebuilt in 1894-5. The Crown and Sugar Loaf has been restored as a separate pub in part of the original premises and is the venue of meetings of the Short Lunch Club.

SOURCE Punch and comic journalism in mid-Victorian Britain by Richard Noakes ■