About

Cheese Grater Magazine Society is more than just a magazine. It’s also a pyramid scheme. We create the satirical magazine The Cheese Grater, our intersectional feminist zine Grater Expectations and the comedy sketch group the UCL Graters.

The Cheese Grater

The Cheese Grater is the alternative magazine at Students’ Union UCL, for those who wish to read something intelligent, funny and biting. It was founded in February 2004, to provide a wittier, more relevant and generally better alternative to UCL’s mainstream publications. In November 2006 – two years after the first issue was released – the magazine won Best Small Budget Publication at the Guardian Student Media Awards, with Time Out London editor Gordon Thompson describing it as a ‘diamond in a sea of shit’.

Investigations in The Cheese Grater attempts to understand the goings on in UCL. Be that inane student politics, or the machiavellian manoeuvres of UCL management – we try to be as thorough as possible.

The Humour section of The Cheese Grater sprawls over the grubby second half of the bi-termly magazine. Featuring satirical news articles, fake (and often libellous) interviews, funny adverts for questionable products, surreal excursions into B-List celebrities’ lives, and soul-searching cartoons, the Humour section is “probably in the top two sections of the magazine” [Quote: Jack Redfern, Humour Editor].

Grater Expectations

Alongside the regular magazine, in 2016 The Cheese Grater published the first issue of Grater Expectations, a zine with a strong intersectional feminist focus. It aims to give our members the opportunity to reimagine what university satire can be, and publish outside of the usual format of The Cheese Grater.

UCL Graters

Taking after their parent magazine, the UCL Graters were founded in 2011, in order to revitalise UCL’s student comedy scene with something that was genuinely funny. Diving headlong into the dark and absurd, the Graters have performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every year since their birth. They have been highly successful, receiving 5-star reviews, and comedian Reginald D. Hunter said: “I can’t promise I’ll come see your show, but I’ll try.”