Fleet Street
Coordinates: 51°30′51″N 0°06′32″W / 51.51417°N 0.10889°W
Fleet Street is a street in the City of London named after the River Fleet, London's largest underground river. It was the home of British national newspapers until the 1980s. Even though the last major British news office, Reuters, left in 2005,[1] the term Fleet Street continues to be used as a metonym for the British national press.
History and location
As early as the 13th century, it seems to have been known as Fleet Bridge Street, and in the early part of the 14th century it began to be mentioned frequently by its present name, spelled in accordance with the customs of those days.[2] Fleet Street began as the road from the commercial City of London to the political hub of Westminster. The length of Fleet Street marks the expansion of the City in the 14th century. At the east end of the street is where the River Fleet flowed against the medieval walls of London; at the west end is the Temple Bar which marks the current City of London/City of Westminster boundary, extended there in 1329. At Temple Bar to the west, as Fleet Street crosses the boundary out of the City of London, it becomes the Strand; to the east, past Ludgate Circus, the route rises as Ludgate Hill.
The A4 road historically began at Ludgate Circus and the whole of Fleet Street was part of the route. However the A4 today begins at Holborn Circus, runs down Fetter Lane and then the western part of Fleet Street. It then continues west into Westminster.
The street numbering runs consecutively from west to east south-side and then east to west north-side.
The nearest London Underground stations are Temple, Chancery Lane, and Blackfriars tube/mainline station, and the City Thameslink railway station.
Religious institutions
In the High Middle Ages senior clergymen had their London palaces in the street. Place-names surviving with this connection are Peterborough Court and Salisbury Court after their respective Bishops' houses here; apart from the Knights Templars' establishment the Whitefriars monastery is recalled by Whitefriars Street and the remains of its undercroft have been preserved in a public display area.
Today three churches serve the spiritual needs of the three 'communities' associated with the area of the street: Temple Church for the Bar, St Bride's Church, remains the London church most associated with the print industry. St Dunstan's in the West supplements these as the local parish (as opposed to guild church) and is the London home for the Romanian Orthodox church.
Legal quarter
To the south lies an area of legal buildings known as the Temple, formerly the property of the Knights Templar, which at its core includes two of the four Inns of Court: the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple. There are many lawyers' offices (especially barristers' chambers) in the vicinity. To the west, at the junction with Strand are the Royal Courts of Justice whilst at the eastern end of the street the Old Bailey is only a few minutes walk from Ludgate Circus.
Taverns and inns
As a principal route leading to and from the City, Fleet Street was especially noted for its taverns and coffeehouses. Many notable persons of literary and political fame used to frequent these, and a few, such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, have survived to this day, in name at least.
Local residents
Many famous men are associated with Fleet Street, either by living there or in one of its many side streets, or by being regular frequenters of its taverns. Amongst these include Ben Jonson, John Milton, Izaak Walton, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson who both lived and compiled his Dictionary in the coincidentally named Johnson Court, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Lamb.[2] John Senex owned a map store on Fleet Street.[3] Wynkyn de Worde was buried in St. Bride's in 1535. In 1633, the church saw Samuel Pepys baptised, there is a small museum display about him in Prince Henry's Room the gatehouse of the Inner Temple. Arthur Ransome has a chapter in his Bohemia in London (1907) about earlier inhabitants of the street: Ben Jonson, the Doctor (Samuel Johnson), Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb; and about Temple Bar and the Press Club.
From 1690 the Royal Society was based in Crane Court.
Great Fire of London
The eastern part of the street was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666 which ended near Fetter Lane and the special tribunal of the 'Fire Courts' was held at Clifford's Inn to arbitrate on claimant's rights following this.
Contemporary Fleet Street
Fleet Street is now more associated with the investment banking, legal and accountancy professions. For example, The Inns of Court and barristers' chambers are down alleys and around courtyards off Fleet Street itself and many of the old newspaper offices have become the London headquarters for various companies; e.g. Goldman Sachs is in the old Daily Telegraph and Liverpool Echo buildings of Peterborough Court and Mersey House. C. Hoare & Co, England's oldest privately owned bank, has had its place of business here since 1690. Child & Co, at 1 Fleet Street, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland claims to be the oldest continuous banking establishment as founded in 1580.
An informal measure of City takeover business employed by financial editors is the number of taxis waiting outside such law firms as Freshfields at 11pm: a long line is held to suggest a large number of mergers and acquisitions in progress.[4]
Press and publishing
Publishing started in Fleet Street around 1500 when William Caxton's apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, set up a printing shop near Shoe Lane, while at around the same time Richard Pynson set up as publisher and printer next to St. Dunstan's church. More printers and publishers followed, mainly supplying the legal trade in the four Law Inns around the area. In March 1702, London's first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was published in Fleet Street from premises above the White Hart Inn. Express Newspapers were the only national newspapers with a Fleet Street address. Almost all of the newspapers thereabouts have moved east to Wapping, Canary Wharf and south to Southwark in the 1980s and 1990s. The former offices of The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and the Reuters organisation are Listed Buildings in both exteriors and parts of interiors.
The London office of D.C. Thomson & Co., creator of The Beano, is still based on Fleet Street. The Secretariat of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association is also based at number 17. Since 1995 Fleet Street has been the home of Wentworth Publishing, an independent publisher of newsletters and courses. In 2006 the Press Gazette returned to Fleet Street, albeit only briefly. The Associated Press remains close by, as did The Jewish Chronicle until 2013 when it moved to Golders Green.[5] The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph have recently returned to the centre of London after having been downriver in Canary Wharf, but have not returned to Fleet Street.
In the adjacent St. Brides Lane is the St Bride Library, holding a specialist collection relating to the type and print industry.
Several other news or publishing-related organisations are clustered on or close to Fleet Street. The British Association of Journalists is based at 89 Fleet Street; the Newspaper Society is nearby on St. Andrew Street; KM Group is at 75 Shoe Lane; and at number 76 is the London International Press Centre, home to TradeWinds, the international shipping news magazine, the Cartoonists' Club, and the International Broadcasting Convention. Metro International, publishers of the free newspaper Metro, are at 85 Fleet Street, while Meteor Press is at number 17.
Other press and publishing related businesses and institutions in and around Fleet Street include The Wall Street Journal in Fleet Place, the New Law Journal, the Perseus Books Group, Bowker UK, Motor Cycle News, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, and the London Press Club.
On the wall of Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street, is a huge mural depicting the history of newspapers in the area.
Monuments and statues
From the eastern end of the street towards the west can be seen various statues and monuments. At the north-eastern corner is a bust of Edgar Wallace, and then at number 106 set in an ornate niche a full-length representation of Mary, Queen of Scots the building originated as the London office of a Scottish insurance company, she has no connection with the area. Above the entrance to the old school-house of St Dunstan's is a statue of Queen Elizabeth I taken from the old Ludgate which was demolished 1766. This statue dated of 1586 is considered to be the oldest outdoor statue in London, there are few other claims that are older. In the porch below are three statues of ancient Britons also from the gate, probably meant to represent King Lud and his two sons. Adjacent to Queen Elizabeth is a bust of Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper proprietor, co-founder of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Next to Lord Northcliffe is a memorial tablet to James Louis Garvin, another pioneering British journalist.
On the southern side of the street nearby memorials and monuments include the Temple Bar; in Inner Temple Gardens is a memorial to Charles Lamb. In Salisbury Court there is an obelisk which originally stood at the south-eastern corner of the street at Ludgate Circus commemorating Alderman Weightman, a Georgian Radical leader of the City, sometime Lord Mayor and MP; it was set up here after many years in storage to commemorate the 800th Anniversary of the Lord Mayoralty in 1989. A short distance further on is a magnificent George and Dragon fountain. On the main street at the corner of Bouverie Street is a plaque commemorating the clockmaker Thomas Tompion and in that street another plaque indicating the birthplace of Samuel Pepys. At number 87 is a bust of TP O'Connor.
Fiction and drama about Fleet Street
The barber Sweeney Todd is traditionally said to have lived and worked in Fleet Street. An urban myth example of a serial killer, the character appears in various English language works starting in the mid-19th century. Neither the popular press, the Old Bailey trial records, the trade directories of the City nor the lists of the Barbers' Company mention any such person or indeed any such case. Adaptations of the story include the 1936 George King film, the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical, and the 2007 Tim Burton film based on the musical, all titled Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
- A. N. Wilson: My Name is Legion (2003)
- Amanda Craig: A Vicious Circle (1996). About a fictitious British newspaper tycoon and the world of publishing in general.
- Michael Wall: Amongst Barbarians (1989). Similar to Lily d'Abo in My Name Is Legion, a white British working class couple takes money from a tabloid in order to be able to help their son.
- Howard Brenton and David Hare: Pravda (1985) About a Rupert Murdoch-like character.
- A. N. Wilson: Scandal (1983). About how a political scandal is created by the tabloid press.
- Michael Frayn: Towards the End of the Morning (1967). A comic novel about failed and failing journalists in a 1960s newspaper.
- Evelyn Waugh: Scoop (1938). About a British newspaper, The Daily Beast, and one of its contributors who is sent to an African country at war called Ishmaelia, based upon the author's experiences in Abyssinia.
- Pete Townshend: "Street in the City". Song.
- The Day The Earth Caught Fire. A 1961 science fiction film, starring Janet Munro and Leo McKern where concurrent Russian and U.S. nuclear tests alter the Earth's orbit, sending it spinning towards the Sun. Much of the impending disaster is seen from the perspective of staff at the Fleet Street office of the Daily Express.
- John Davidson: Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) and A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1896).
- Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities. Tellson's Bank is in Fleet Street.
- Charles Dickens: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, more commonly known as The Pickwick Papers. Set in Fleet Street.
- The opening sequence of Children of Men is set on Fleet Street. The protagonist, portrayed by Clive Owen, leaves a café which then explodes in an act of terrorism.
Non-fiction
- Nick Davies: Flat Earth News (2008).
- Linda Melvern: "The End of the Street" (1986).
- Peter Paterson Much More of This, Old Boy...? Scenes From a Reporter's Life (2011)[6]
- Fritz Spiegl: Keep Taking the Tabloids. What the Papers Say and How They Say It (1983).
- Alan Watkins: A Short Walk Down Fleet Street.
- A. N. Wilson: London: A Short History (2004).
See also
- History of British newspapers
- List of United Kingdom newspapers
- The Printworks, Fleet Street of the North
- Holborn, with a description of the surrounding area
- Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in Delhi, known as the Fleet Street of India
- Prince Henry's Room, a museum located at 17 Fleet Street
References
- ↑ Hagerty, Bill (2005-06-14). "UK | Magazine | Farewell, Fleet Street". BBC News. Retrieved 2014-05-01.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1
Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Fleet Street". Encyclopedia Americana. - ↑ "The Historical Theater in the Year 400 AD, in Which Both Romans and Barbarians Resided Side by Side in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire". World Digital Library. 1725. Retrieved 2013-07-27.
- ↑ Financial Times magazine
- ↑ Jewish Chronicle HQ to be recycled into serviced flats, Property Week, 21 February 2014
- ↑ http://www.amazon.com/Much-More-This-Old-Boy/dp/0956557538
Further reading
- John Timbs (1867), "Fleet-Street", Curiosities of London (2nd ed.), London: J.C. Hotten, OCLC 12878129
- Herbert Fry (1880), "Fleet Street", London in 1880, London: David Bogue. (bird's eye view)
- Wilfred Whitten (1913), "Street of the Ready Writers", A Londoner's London, London: Methuen & Co.. (about Fleet Street)
- "Fleet Street". London. Let's Go. 1998. p. 174. OL 24256167M.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fleet Street. |
- Farewell, Fleet Street. Bill Hagerty, BBC News Online. 14 June 2005.
- Fleet Street's finest. Christopher Hitchens, The Guardian Review. 3 December 2005.
- Drinking in the Street. SilkTork, RateBeer Article. 19 January 2006
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