News, not fake: Fleet Street's real connection to London media
- Mar 3, 2017
- 1 min read
Fleet Street in 2017, (left, Ashley Winchester) and in its heyday in 1890 (right, Collage - The London Picture Archive).
Fleet street, home of London’s press corps for generations, is now bereft of UK publishers. Sound like fake news? It’s not.
But first, a little history.
Even before the arrival of newspapers, Fleet Street was a printing hub. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde brought his press to the street, next to St. Bride’s church, where he printed textbooks and cheap popular works, and others soon followed, according to church literature. Royal printer Richard Grafton published the first officially sanctioned English Bible here in 1539. News-sheets, the precursor to modern newspapers, arrived in the mid-1600s, and, beginning with the Daily Courant, published here on March 11, 1702, Fleet Street grew to become the centre of London’s news industry.
Today, Fleet Street tells another story. Tour buses passing through are as likely to point out “demon barber” Sweeney Todd’s fictional Fleet Street connections as they are to regale the now newspaperless nexus of British media. The last journalists reportedly moved out of offices here in August of 2016, leaving behind a street more populated with food chains than publications.
“As someone who always wanted to be a journalist, and with a keen sense of history as well, just looking at the buildings even now still excites me," Sunday Post reporter Darryl Smith told the BBC in August 2016, ahead of the Dundee, Scotland-based newspaper’s move from its Fleet Street office. “It makes me smile, when I think of how I now have that place in history.”
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