Everything about Fleet Street totally explained
Fleet Street is a street in
London,
England named after the
River Fleet. It was the home of the
British press until the 1980s. Even though the last major British news office,
Reuters, left in 2005, the
street's name continues to be used as a
metonym for the
British national
press (comparable to
Kochstraße for the German national press).
History and location
Fleet Street began as the road from the
City of London to the
City 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
mediæval walls of London; at the west end is the
Temple Bar which marks the current city limits, stretched to that point when the land and property of the
Knights Templar were acquired.
To the south lies the complex of buildings known as The Temple, formerly the property of the
Knights Templar, which houses two of the four
Inns of Court, the
Inner Temple and the
Middle Temple. There are many lawyers' offices in the vicinity.
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, the world's first daily newspaper,
The Daily Courant, was published in Fleet Street from premises above the White Hart Inn.
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, it evolves into
Ludgate Hill. The nearest
tube stations are
Temple,
Chancery Lane, and
Blackfriars and it's very close to
City Thameslink station.
Chancery Lane and
Fetter Lane are at the western end of the street.
Fleet Street is a location on the London version of the
Monopoly board game.
Fleet Street is also famous for the barber
Sweeney Todd, traditionally said to have lived and worked in Fleet Street (he is sometimes called "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street"). An early example of a serial killer, the character appears in various English language works starting in the mid-19th century. There are some records that show he actually existed, but the authenticity of these is disputed.
Present day
Fleet Street is now more associated with the Law and its courts and barristers' chambers, many of which are in alleys off Fleet Street itself, almost all of the newspapers thereabouts having moved to
Wapping and
Canary Wharf. The former offices of
The Daily Telegraph, drawn upon as a source by
Evelyn Waugh in his comic novel
Scoop, are now the London headquarters of the investment bank
Goldman Sachs.
C. Hoare & Co, England's oldest privately owned bank, has had its place of business here since
1690. 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.
The French-owned international news and photo agency
Agence France Presse is still based in Fleet Street, as is the London office of
D.C. Thomson & Co., creator of
The Beano. 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.
The Associated Press and
The Jewish Chronicle remain close by.
The Daily Telegraph and
Sunday Telegraph have recently returned to the centre of London after exile downriver in
Canary Wharf, but are still a few miles away, near Victoria Station.
Child & Co Bankers, one of the country's oldest private banks and owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc, is based at 1 Fleet Street.
Culture
The term Fleet Street is also used to indicate that a journalist is a member of the generation that worked on newspapers prior to their move away from its vicinity, and is synonymous with a bibulous, collegial tradition characterised by such figures as
Paul Callan and Brian Vine. Gossip was exchanged over liquid lunches at such hostelries as El Vino, now a haven for lawyers of the
Rumpole school. Liquid dinners were equally familiar, editors often dining in the Grill of the
Savoy Hotel, returning about 10pm to see the first editions of their papers roll off the presses. These were then transported by road to railway stations to catch the night mail expresses to far-flung corners of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
A significant mythology has accreted around Fleet Street, its characters, their scoops – and imaginative expense accounts. The most durable concern, however, stories that were
not printed, usually on account of Britain's strict
libel laws. Few of the novels referenced below constitute exaggerations, the truth being, in the cliché of the sub-editors on the back benches, "stranger than fiction". According to journalistic lore it wasn't editors who constituted the heart of Fleet Street but diary writers and gossip columnists, whose stories would often make the front page: the exploits of
Diana Princess of Wales provided frequent examples of diary stories transmuted into news and even news features.
Journalists
The content of a Fleet Street newspaper is influenced by its proprietor, editor, journalists and columnists. Many of the owners achieved notoriety, notably
Lord Northcliffe,
Lord Beaverbrook and
Robert Maxwell, all of whom used their papers to support their political agenda, an approach still employed by some present day proprietors. Generally newspapers are run on more business-like lines today, with some expectation of profit, or at least manageable losses. Ownership was long considered an honour for which the proprietor was expected to pay: with it came influence, and if exercised responsibly, an honour usually followed.
A number of great editors are still recalled and their dictates followed long after being summoned to the "great newsroom in the sky" as one obituarist put it. They include
Arthur Christianson of the
Daily Express and Sir
John Junor of the
Sunday Express. Of living editors the brief reign of
Janet Street-Porter at the
Independent on Sunday is still the subject of many anecdotes, some of them true. Each editor is supported by department heads such as the foreign editor, news editor, picture editor and chief sub-editor, all of whom attend the morning conference to determine the day's news agenda. Rule number one of Fleet Street journalism is that "The Editor's decision is final". Unless, of course, the proprietor intervenes, as
Rupert Murdoch is recorded by his biographers as doing on a number of occasions.
By consent the elite of journalists are its foreign and war correspondents, of whom there are many fewer than formerly. There is also a highly paid category of experienced writers, the "firemen", who are dispatched to crisis venues to report, these days often via satellite telephones. The stock of political editors stands lower than hitherto, having been the subject of both political and academic criticism for becoming too close to government press officers, notably
Alastair Campbell. The latter are accused of manipulating the political news agenda - "spinning" - by feeding stories, sometimes slanted, to certain favoured newspapers and sympathetic correspondents thereon. Some of the most highly paid journalists are the diary editors and show business reporters, whose contacts are highly valued. Crime correspondents rank lower in the hierarchy along with sports reporters, and are remunerated accordingly.
Certain reporters have achieved legendary status, their adventures still recounted admiringly. They include
Bill Deedes, immortalised by
Evelyn Waugh, the Anglo-Indian gossip columnist Nigel Demptster, who purported to be an Australian, fellow diarist Jan Reid who claimed to be the grandchild of Queen Victoria, the
Daily Express's New York correspondent Brian Vine, known as "El Vino", showbiz interviewer
Paul Callan who slept,
inter alia, with his little black book containing the private telephone numbers of
Cary Grant and the
Pope, and profiler Geoff "The Hatchet" Levy.
Columnists are not necessarily journalists, some being TV personalities like
Terry Wogan, retired police chiefs, or politicians who have failed to achieve the highest office. Examples of the latter would be the self-confessed "Champagne Socialist"
Woodrow Wyatt and the unsuccessful Conservative leadership candidate
Michael Portillo. Each newspaper will also usually have as columnists one perky blonde housewife, and a
polemicist tasked to take a contrarian view on the week's events, plus an
agony aunt to advise readers on their sexual problems, preferably in explicit detail.
There is a Fleet Street tradition of retaining a corpus of outside experts to pontificate on major issues. Among the most frequently employed are military historians like
Corelli Barnett and
Nigel West whose speciality is security and intelligence. Leading academics like the historian
Niall Ferguson and the philosopher
Roger Scruton are valued for their ability to summarise both sides of an argument and reach a persuasive conclusion compatible with newspaper's standpoint - all within a thousand words.
Editorial policy
Unlike the United States where national newspapers don't exist in the European sense, and the
liberal or conservative perspective of some major newspapers isn't openly declared, Fleet Street has enjoyed the diversity of over a dozen national daily and Sunday newspapers with differing political stances. Indeed these newspapers are quite open about their biases: a reader of
The Guardian would be well aware of the liberal sympathies of its editorials, that of the
Daily Telegraph of its support for Conservative policies. Other right-leaning papers include the
Daily Mail and more recently the
Daily Express, whereas
The Independent is considered to follow a more
politically correct line. The
Daily Mirror aligns itself with the trades unions and
Labour Party-supporting working classes. The positions adopted by the
Times and, more surprisingly, the
Financial Times have in recent years been centre-left and generally supportive of
New Labour. The policy of the
Daily Sport was characterised by one commentator as "pro-nipple". The Sunday versions of these papers follow the editorial line of their daily sister.
Fiction and drama about 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 (1985) (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 thinly disguised 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)
- Christopher Bond's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street adapted by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler(Fleet Street is the setting of the operatic musical, which is fictitious, though possibly based on a true series of incidents.)
- 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: (Setting of the Tellson's Bank is on 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 act of terrorism.
Non-fiction
Fritz Spiegl: Keep Taking the Tabloids. What the Papers Say and How They Say It (1983).
A. N. Wilson: (2004).
Alan Watkins: A Short Walk Down Fleet Street.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Fleet Street'.
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