Kit-Cat Club

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 Catt.

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 specially built for the purpose at Barn Elms, the home of the secretary Jacob Tonson.

Christopher Catt was the keeper of a pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar (then located in Fleet Street), where the club originally met.

[3] John Vanbrugh's modern biographer Kerry Downes suggests that the club's origins go back to before the Glorious Revolution of 1688; and that its political importance for the promotion of Whig objectives was greater before it became known.

Downes cites John Oldmixon, who knew many of those involved, and who wrote in 1735 of how some club members "before the Revolution [of 1688] met frequently in the Evening at a Tavern, near Temple Bar, to unbend themselves after Business, and have a little free and cheerful Conversation in those dangerous Times".

Other notables included Samuel Garth, Charles Dartiquenave, Richard Steele, and the Dukes of Grafton, Devonshire, Kingston, Richmond, Manchester, Dorset, and Lords Sunderland and Wharton.