Naive American scholars sometimes go looking for Grub Street but it has never existed as a geographical entity. Grub Street is a collection of periodicals that deal with literature and of newspapers that have literary pages: a collection of those, and of the people who edit and write for them. Grub Street is like a small Great Rift whose favoured watering holes continually change position. In the times of Swift and Dr Johnson, the gathering places were the coffee houses. In my time, they were the pubs.
