The Kit-Cat Club (sometimes Kit-Kat Club) was an early 18th-century English club in London with strong political and literary associations, committed to the furtherance of Whig objectives, meeting at the Trumpet tavern in London, and at Water Oakley in the Berkshire countryside.
The first meetings were held at a tavern in Shire Lane (parallel with Bell Yard and now covered by the Royal Courts of Justice) run by an innkeeper called Christopher Catling. He gave his name to the mutton pies known as "Kit Cats" from which the name of the club is derived.
The club later moved to the Fountain Tavern on The Strand (now the site of Simpson's-in-the-Strand), and latterly into a room especially built for the purpose at Barn Elms, the home of the secretary Jacob Tonson. In summer the club met at the Upper Flask, Hampstead Heath.
Read more about Kit-Cat Club: Origins, Possible Earlier Objectives, Prominent Members, Toasts
Famous quotes containing the word club:
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
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