Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE FLEET STREET PRESS
Fleet Street's associations with the printed press began in 1500, when Wynkyn de Worde,
William Caxton's apprentice (and the first man to print italics), moved the Caxton presses from
Westminster to Fleet Street to be close to the lawyers of the Inns of Court (his best customers)
and to the clergy of St Paul's, London's largest literate group. In 1702, the world's first daily
newspaper, the now defunct
Daily Courant
, began publishing here, and by the nineteenth
century, all the major national and provincial dailies had moved their presses to the area.
Then in 1985, Britain's first colour tabloid,
Today
, appeared, using computer technology that
rendered the Fleet Street presses obsolete. It was left to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch to
take on the printers' unions in a bitter year-long dispute that changed the newspaper
industry for ever.
The press headquarters that once dominated the area have all now relocated, leaving just a
handful of small publications and a few architectural landmarks to testify to five hundred years
of printing history. The former
Daily Telegraph
building, at nos. 135-141, is one of London's
few truly Art Deco edifices, built in a Greco-Egyptian style in 1928, with a striking polychrome
clock and a great stone relief above the doorway depicting Mercury's messengers sending
news around the world. It was upstaged a few years later, however, by the city's first glass
curtain-wall construction, the former
Daily Express
building at no. 127, with its sleek black
Vitrolite facade. It's worth peering inside the cinema-like foyer, which features a silver-leaf
sunburst ceiling, ocean-wave floor tiles, shiny silver serpent handrails and remarkable chrome
and gold relief panels extolling the British Empire.
There's a tiled wall in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street, which illustrates the history of Fleet
Street's presses, and some metal information panels nearby in the windows of the old
Daily
Mail
building at Ashentree Court, off Whitefriars Street. Another account of Fleet Street's
history is the exhibition in the crypt of
St Bride's Church
(Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat 11am-3pm,
Sun 10am-6.30pm; free;
T
020 7427 0133,
W
stbrides.com), the “journalists' and printers'
cathedral”, situated behind the former Reuters building. The church also boasts Wren's tallest,
and most exquisite, spire (said to be the inspiration for the traditional tiered wedding cake).
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The statue of Queen Elizabeth I, in a niche in the vestry wall, and the crumbling
statues of the legendary King Lud and his two sons in the porch, originally stood over
Ludgate, the City gateway that once stood halfway up Ludgate Hill. The church's
unusual, octagonal, neo-Gothic interior features a huge wooden iconostasis, used
during the regular Romanian Orthodox services.
Dr Johnson's House
17 Gough Square • Mon-Sat: May-Sept 11am-5.30pm; Oct-April 11am-5pm • £4.50 •
T
020 7353 3745,
W
drjohnsonshouse.org •
!
Blackfriars
Numerous narrow alleyways lead off the north side of Fleet Street beyond Fetter Lane,
concealing legal chambers and of
ces. Two of the narrow alleyways that lead north off
Fleet Street - Bolt Court and Hind Court - eventually open out into cobbled Gough
Square, which features a statue of Dr Johnson's cat, Hodge, enjoying an oyster. The
square's one authentic eighteenth-century building is
Dr Johnson's House,
where the
great savant, writer and lexicographer lived from 1748 to 1759 while compiling the
41,000 entries for his very successful English dictionary.
Johnson rented the house on Gough Square with the £1575 advance he received for
the dictionary. Despite his subsequent fame, Johnson was in and out of debt all his
life - his bestselling romance,
Rasselas
, was written in less than a week to raise funds
for his mother's funeral. The house itself is a lovely Georgian period piece peppered
with quotes by the great man and portraits of his contemporaries, including Johnson's
servant Francis Barber, to whom he left most of his wordly goods. On the second
floor, you can watch a film on Johnson's life, after which you get to see the open-plan
attic, in which Johnson and his six clerks put together the dictionary, and where kids
can try on some replica Georgian garb.
