Fleet Street remembered

A quick canter through the

glory days with Anthony Howard…

ADAPT or die’ is a motto made for journalists and Fleet Street, once home of England’s national newspapers. Life in ‘The Street’ was rumbustious, competitive, congenial and boozy. And not for nothing was the Daily Mirror staff’s favourite pub known as ‘The Stab in the Back’.

Fleet Street has been synonymous with printing, book publishing and latterly newspapers for 500 years since William Caxton and his apprentice Wynkyn de Worde began their work there, fostered by the literacy of the large numbers of clergy inhabiting nearby religious establishments.

Looking west: Fleet Street

Looking east: Ludgate Hill

Much more a lifestyle than a workplace, this historic half mile between the Royal Courts of Justice and Ludgate Circus presented myriad opportunities for networking one’s talents and ideas in abundant pubs, wine bars, clubs and eateries.

Many habitués lived out their entire careers there, pursuing ambitions for excitement, adventure, promotion, power and even fame, and enjoying love, companionship and lifelong friendships.

When a confrère joined the Mirror a fortnight after being interviewed, his new boss’s secretary welcomed him with a big smile and laughed: “When John didn’t come back from The Stab until half past three, we knew you were the one who’d got the job.”

Right: Holborn Circus - former site of the heroic Mirror building, now the HQ of J Sainsbury plc, grocers

Below: Where once they caroused at The Stab in The Back, today they lunch soberly at Pizza Express

An Australian colleague wrote recently of first joining a Brisbane newspaper: “I learned important journalistic skills such as boozing and smoking.”

Once acquired, such expertise remained invaluable for the rest of one’s life. A journalist returning from abroad and seeking employment would invariably first trawl ‘The Street’s’ hostelries: the King & Keys, Punch Tavern, Popinjay, Old Bell, King Lud, Cheshire Cheese, Wine Press, City Golf Club, Scribes and legendary El Vino’s.

'The Punch'

'The Cheese'

'Vino's'

'The Bell'

'The WP'

It was a bad day, if he – or maybe she – left ‘Vino’s’ at 3.30pm without having shared an agreeable impromptu drink or three with a group of friends or acquaintances, one of whom was on the lookout for a new writer or at least knew someone who was hiring.

But the writing had been on the wall for a long time. In the mid-1960s, a fat report examined each national title from top to bottom, and concluded that Fleet Street was unsustainable if over-manning and rejection of new technologies continued any longer.

The seemingly intractable problem was that the print trades unions had – or thought they had – proprietors over a barrel because, like fish, the product was so perishable. These difficulties were exacerbated by the advent of commercial television, an unwelcome rival for advertising revenues.

The unions finally met their nemesis in the form of Rupert Murdoch, an ambitious Australian newspaper owner. He gained his first foothold in London in 1969, first acquiring the News of the World and then buying the broadsheet Sun, owned by the Mirror group. He quickly turned the Sun against its former owner, transforming it into a lively tabloid and luring Mirror journalists with fat salaries.

Unfazed by local custom, Murdoch began an agenda of expansion and rationalisation that in 1986 impelled his titles to make a turbulent exit from Fleet Street. And there was no place for ‘old Spanish practices’ at his soulless new high-tech premises at 'Fortress Wapping' in London’s Docklands on the far side of the City.

As the dust settled, other proprietors became emboldened to mmodernise and out-stare the unions. Thus began the exodus to various points of the London compass, which left a vacuum quickly filled by bankers and accountants.

Yet, intriguingly, the legend lives on 20 years later. Even today, hacks of a certain vintage are still drawn to ‘The Street’, periodically using its bars as convenient rendezvous from their offices now dispersed in Wapping, Kensington, Southwark, Farringdon Road, Victoria, Lower Thames Street and Canary Wharf.

The Great Reaper’s baleful work also brings ‘em back to St Bride’s the ‘journalists’ church’ rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1680s after the Great Fire of London, destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, then rebuilt again and rededicated in 1957.

For, all too frequently, St Bride’s pews are packed for memorial services, at which journalists articulately remember newly departed colleagues before striding purposefully towards El Vino’s to enjoy a bottle or two and reminisce about the glory days l

St Bride's from the north

St Bride's from the west

Seen from Waterloo Bridge across the Thames: St Bride's spire at left and St Paul's at right centre

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