A salute to Mrs Moon's on Fleet St.

After a recent trip to England, these electronic clippings about the last days of Mrs Moon's pub on Fleet Street landed in my email inbox--sent by a friend. Click on them for a taste of nostalgia about the bad old days on the Street of Shame. When I was there the ghosts still seemed to be roaming.

~ Published in February 1984 ~





FLEET STREET TODAY



The Cheshire Cheese pub can be seen on the left in the picture above, which is a view of Fleet Street looking east toward St. Paul's Cathedral. The new building on the right is where Mrs Moon's pub once stood.



The Cheshire Cheese was rebuilt in 1667, the year after the great fire of London.



This lane runs between St. Bride's Church and Fleet Street. In the old days, when children were not allowed inside pubs, they could play outside in this lane or in the churchyard while their journalist parents were imbibing at The Bell.

St. Bride's was designed by Christopher Wren, the architect who designed St. Paul's Cathedral. It was built as a place of worship for the workers constructing St. Paul's.



This is a view of The Bell pub taken from the upper deck of a bus on Fleet Street.



There are no longer any news organizations on Fleet Street. When Reuters sold its 85 Fleet Street headquarters last year it became the last news organization to leave. The distinctive St. Bride's "wedding cake" spire can be seen above the building, which is shrouded in scaffolding.



The Reuters London and online bureaux are now in Kildare House on Dorset Rise. St. Bride's is behind the building on the left.



Reuters global headquarters is now at Canary Wharf. A display board shows some of the pictures and stories that are posted on the Websites in Toronto.

Motorboats, rowboats & automobiles

Getting to Leech Lake from Toronto is a bit of an odyssey.

The drive to Espanola takes about five hours, the motorboat portion of the trip takes about half an hour, hiking through swampy bush takes about 20 minutes and rowing takes another 20 minutes.


It’s necessary to take everything that will be needed, but no more, so that the knapsack isn’t too heavy to carry.

Planning the trip in the fall when the forecasts show rain and very cool temperatures is tricky because it means lugging gear for different types of weather.


I took a protective anti-bear jingle bell—just in case—because hunters bait the bears on the path through the bush.

The driving was good, and the journey on the way there was pretty uneventful, except that I parked in a spot designated for parents and children at the grocery store in Espanola.



The weather was cloudy and wet at the cabin except on the last night when it was clear enough to have a campfire and see the Milky Way.


Minty hot chocolate spiked with dark rum helped dispel the chill.

The loon swam on the lake calling out its distinctive, haunting cry. Apart from that I didn’t see much wildlife except for a rabbit and some migrating birds.


A goldfinch flew into the cabin window and dropped dead on the ground.

Honking Canadian geese flapped over the island one afternoon, but gunshots rang out and the birds fell silent.

I found the skull of a small animal and the lower jaw of another animal while tramping around the island.




I saw a late-season frog hopping and a dead fish floating in the lake.

There were a few tired old mosquitoes buzzing around making half-hearted efforts to pierce through human skin for fresh blood.

I managed to thwack each one of them and remained unscathed.

The return to civilization was trickier because of the high winds and rain. ~