LONDON // It is the birthplace of British journalism but today the 300-year-old link between Fleet Street and the printed word will become little more than a memory. Go back 30 years and virtually every major newspaper and news bureau was located on, or very near, the "street of shame" - so dubbed because of the excesses of the tabloid press and, more than occasionally, the excesses of its journalists.
Today, all the newspapers have since moved to hi-tech pastures new and, with the closure this morning of the Agence France-Presse office, Fleet Street will lose its last international newsroom. The only newspaper office left is the London bureau of the Scottish publisher, DC Thomson. It is a loss being keenly felt by every reporter who still regards Fleet Street as his or her spiritual home. Yet it was as much the extra-journalistic activities that went on in Fleet Street that made the place a legend in its own (very long) lunchtime.
An American reporter, sent to London in the mid-1970s, remarked incredulously: "When I first set my Los Angeles eyes on London's Fleet Street, its most amazing aspect, besides being the centre of a dynamic and competitive national press, was the amount of time its denizens spent imbibing alcoholic beverages at lunch - before completing the day's work." Proprietors tolerated the raucous behaviour that followed lunches that stretched into two or three hours - and sometimes, non-stop into the evening - because they knew that, at a moment's notice, these same reporters would willingly be dispatched to some godforsaken and often dangerous corner of the globe and spend the next days, weeks, even months diligently and, usually, impeccably fulfilling their journalistic duties.
Take Vincent Mulchrone, for example, who died 30 years ago at the age of 54 and who would kick start each morning with a bottle of Moet at the Harrow pub or El Vino's wine bar. A drunk? Perhaps. But one of Fleet Street's very finest who, for example, wrote of the lying in state of Sir Winston Churchill: "Two rivers run silently through London tonight, and one is made of people. "Dark and quiet as the night-time Thames itself, it flows through Westminster Hall, eddying about the foot of the rock called Churchill."
There were so many others who, one moment, would be throwing punches in "the Tip" or the King and Keys; the next, churning out prose with an elan all too rarely seen in today's celebrity-obsessed, one-size-fits-all newspapers. But the demise of Fleet Street became inevitable with the arrival of new technology. Newspapers, particularly the "inkies" involved on the printing side, were vastly overstaffed, overpaid and over-unionised.
When Rupert Murdoch moved The Sun and News of the World (plus The Times and Sunday Times, situated a respectable distance away in Gray's Inn Road) to new, modern premises in Docklands in 1986, the writing was on the wall. Progressively, everyone else abandoned Fleet Street, where the first newspaper, the Daily Courant, began publishing in 1702. Today, only the façades of newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express remain on the street of shame. Behind those façades, are the headquarters of today's headline-makers: the merchant banks and other financial institutions.
Still, journalists scattered to the outer fringes of London have a homing instinct for Fleet Street. Many a leaving party is still held in establishments there, one of which old-timers still remember as the Golf Club but which is now called the Press House Wine Bar - though there is precious little evidence of the press among its regular clientele. And at least the name remains as a collective noun for the British press. During the recent G20 summit, US President Barack Obama referred to "Fleet Street" and everyone knew what he meant.
dsapsted@thenational.ae