Encyclopedia:
Fleet Street,
Boston Legal,
Fleet Street Lighthouse,
Fleet Street (TTC),
Fleet Street Publisher,
Fleet Street Goodies,
Talk:Fleet Street,
Image:Fleet Street. By James Valentine c.1890..jpg,
Sweeney Todd (musical),
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Fleet Street is a famous street in
London,
England, named after the
River Fleet. It was traditionally the home of the
British press, up 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
synonym for the
British national
press.
Present day
It is now more associated with the Law and its courts and barristers' chambers, many of which are located in alleys off Fleet Street itself, almost all of the newspapers that formerly resided 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. 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.
[ Financial Times magazine]The French owned international news and photo agency
Agence France Presse are still based in Fleet Street, as is the London office of the venerable comic
The Beano. In
2006 the
Press Gazette returned to Fleet Street.
The Jewish Chronicle offices remain close by.
The Daily Telegraph and
Sunday Telegraph have recently returned to the centre of London after an unhappy exile downriver in
Canary Wharf.
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 England.
A significant mythology has accreted around Fleet Street, its characters, their scoops - and imaginative expense accounts. The most durable of these 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 untiring cliché of the sub-editors on the back benches, "stranger than fiction". According to journalistic lore it was not the editors who constituted the heart of Fleet Street, but the diary writers and gossip columnists, whose stories would often make the front page: the exploits of the late
Diana Princess of Wales provided frequent examples of diary stories transmuted into news and 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 public notoriety, notably
Lord Northcliffe,
Lord Beaverbrook and the fraudster
Robert Maxwell, all of whom used their papers to support their own 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 will 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 common 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 presently stands lower within the profession 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 heirarchy 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 grand-child 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 who according to Fleet Street phantasy is only let out at full moon.
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 longstanding Fleet Street tradition of retaining a corps of outside experts to pontificate on major issues. Among the most frequently employed are military historians like
Corelli Barnett and
Nigel West whose specialism 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 do not exist in the European sense, and the
liberal or conservative perspective of some major newspapers is not 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 its socialist sympathies, 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-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".
[ Attributed to Brian MacArthur, media correspondent of the Sunday Times. Such matters are tracked with care, a running nipple count being maintained by competing tabloids.] The Sunday versions of these papers follow the editorial line of their daily sister.
thumb|Fleet Street in [1890]
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.
thumb|right|250px|[Ludgate Circus]
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 is very close to
City Thameslink station.
Fleet Street is a location on the London version of the
Monopoly board game.
thumb|150px|The Fleet Street dragonFiction and drama about Fleet Street
*
A. N. Wilson:
My Name is Legion (2004).
*
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 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)
*
Stephen Sondheim and
Hugh Wheeler:
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (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.
*
Charles Dickens:
A Tale of Two Cities: (Setting of the Tellson's Bank is on Fleet Street).
thumb|Fleet Street road signNon-fiction
*
Fritz Spiegl:
Keep Taking the Tabloids. What the Papers Say and How They Say It (1983).
*
A. N. Wilson:
London: A Short History (2004).
*
Alan Watkins:
A Short Walk Down Fleet Street.
See also
*
Holborn, with a description of the surrounding area
*
History of British newspapers*
List of United Kingdom newspapers*
Madison AvenueExternal links
*
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4091172.stm Farewell, Fleet Street. Bill Hagerty,
BBC News Online.
June 14,
2005.
*
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1655516,00.html Fleet Street's finest. Christopher Hitchens,
The Guardian Review.
December 3,
2005.
*
http://www.ratebeer.com/Beer-News/Article-577.htm Drinking in the Street. SilkTork,
http://www.ratebeer.com/ RateBeer Article.
January 19,
2006Category:Streets in LondonCategory:Newspaper headquarterscs:Fleet Streetda:Fleet Streetde:Fleet Streethe:רחוב פליטnl:Fleet Streetno:Fleet StreetNotes
