Financial Institutions Moving In : Newspapers Fleeing From London’s Famed Fleet St.
Journalist Colin Webb says he is steeling himself for the day when someone says to him at a cocktail party: “Oh, so you’re in Fleet Street, are you? Banking or insurance?”
For Webb, editor-in-chief of Press Assn., the domestic British news agency, this ignominy may be close at hand.
As one newspaper after another flees Fleet Street for modern plants elsewhere, banks and other financial institutions are moving in along the thoroughfare and the narrow lanes wending south to the River Thames and north to Holborn Street.
The short, crowded street and adjoining warren of crooked alleys and hidden courtyards, the haunt of Dickens, Pepys and Dr. Johnson, was once synonymous with the newspaper industry--noisy, grubby and exuberant.
“The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street,” observed the Victorian essayist Charles Lamb.
Urban Renewal Program
Now, as the capital’s fulcrum moves east to the Docklands in Europe’s biggest urban renewal program, Fleet Street is gradually being absorbed into the neighboring city, London’s financial district.
The shells of the newspaper buildings remain, largely because the entire street has been designated a conservation area to retain its Dickensian character. Behind the facades, however, the presses and newsrooms are being ripped out and replaced with trading floors and computers.
Instead of printers and reporters rushing to meet deadlines, the street is full of construction workers and lawyers, stockbrokers and deal makers.
Property values and rents have soared as the conglomerates created by London’s blossoming financial markets compete for office space on the old “street of ink.”
The first newspaper to capitalize on the property boom was the London Evening Standard. Its former home on Shoe Lane was torn down to make way for the head offices of accountants Coopers & Lybrand.
Headquarters for U.S. Firm
In 1984, the Daily Telegraph sold its 1.15 acre site at 135 Fleet Street, complete with Art Deco lobby and penthouse lawn and garden. It is being developed into the European headquarters of Goldman Sachs, the American investment banking firm.
News International, which publishes the Sun and News of the World tabloids, will turn its Bouverie Street site into an office development.
The Financial Times’ Bracken House headquarters went to the Japanese construction firm Ohbayashiin in June, 1986, for about $230 million.
The Daily Express, whose black-facaded building still frowns imposingly over Fleet Street, also is moving out. Only Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group, publishers of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, has not yet announced plans to leave.
Keeping Maxwell company are the news agencies: The Associated Press, directly behind the Mirror Building, and Reuters, which shares the Press Assn. building.
Andrew Saint of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission said the newspaper industry is the last major one to move out.
Fleet Street proper begins at Temple Bar, an ancient boundary marker for the City of London, and until the 18th Century the spot where the severed heads of traitors were displayed.
Named after the nearby Fleet River that now runs underground, it was one of medieval London’s main east-west routes for travel between the government at Westminster and commerce in the city.
To this day, whenever the monarch makes a state visit to the city, she pauses at Temple Bar for a ceremony with the lord mayor.
The first recorded printer, Wynkyn de Worde, arrived about 1500 and set up shop near Shoe Lane where bookbinders worked. The first newspaper, The Daily Courant, arrived in 1702.
Showplace for Freaks
Before that, Fleet Street had been a showplace for freaks, fire-eaters and wild animals.
Diarist Samuel Pepys reputedly was born in Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street, in 1633. Samuel Johnson, the great writer and lexicographer, lived and worked in the area in the mid-18th Century, and his house in Gough Square is a museum.
Fleet Street also is home to the Middle Temple, one of four sets of offices and apartments for senior lawyers known as the Inns of the Court. Above its entrance at No. 17 Fleet Street the partly timbered building is one of the few domestic buildings in London to survive from Shakespeare’s time.
For centuries, journalists have worshiped at Christopher Wren’s splendid St. Bride’s church at the foot of the street.
Pepys was baptized in the church, and the parents of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in Colonial America, were married here. So were the parents of Edward Winslow, a leader of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Lightning knocked eight feet off St. Bride’s steeple in 1764, and among those King George III called in to advise him on repairs was Benjamin Franklin.
The church was gutted by World War II bombs and rebuilt with donations from London newspapers.
Although some newspapers have moved to new, high-tech premises, “Fleet Street” is still used to describe Britain’s national press.
“I don’t think one will have ‘off-Fleet Street,’ like you have Broadway, off-Broadway,” Webb said.
Certain other things never change.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, the pub and restaurant with sawdust covered floors, rebuilt in 1667 after the great fire of London and later frequented by Dr. Johnson’s crowd, still sells a traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner for about $8.75.
And at El Vino’s, men still must wear ties and women are not served at the bar.
