Why Fleet Street?
Fleet Street, a main thoroughfare linking Westminster with the City of London, has been the traditional home of literary and journalistic London for around five hundred years. The Caxton printing presses moved there in 1500. In 1702 Britain’s first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, set up its presses there, beginning a boom of over 250 years during which all the major national newspapers had offices and presses in the area. That boom had ended by the mid-1980s when new technology and union-busting managers finally undermined the printers’ power and the major newspapers decamped to new sites – including ‘Fortress Wapping’ in the docklands area to the east of the city. But the spirit of Fleet Street breathes on. Eighteenth century writer and wit Charles Lamb once said, ‘The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.’ That observation, minus the gender exclusivity and the back-to-front construction, remains true, thanks to the virtual Fleet Street and i
