Last of the Dodos.
‘What first attracted you to Fleet Street, Mr Hack?’ is a question which has never been answered adequately.
‘Tis a toss up whether it was the proliferation of ale houses, providing refuge from the squalor, the rotting fish, dead dogs and suicidal humans, or the presence of Wynkyn de Worde’s hand cranked printing press in the churchyard of St Bride’s that could churn out a cheap pamphlet or two.
The open sewer that was the Fleet river may have been tarmacked over, but somehow the stench never quite left the area. For 500 years, ‘man with gossip’ has beaten a path to the street, secure in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, would print his tale.
The Guardian, or more properly, the Manchester Guardian was the first to hold its nose, and depart for cleaner pastures, back in the 1960s. Followed by Reuters, 40, years later, the only news organisation that lay claim to being ethical and unbiased. There had been a time when you wouldn’t dare refer to yourself as a ‘proper’ journalist unless you had trained at the BBC or Reuters.
The Lutyens designed Reuters building turned into a trendy and lethally expensive restaurant for Goldman Sachs employees who inhabited the Old Daily Express offices, at least until penury, a comparative term in banking history, forced them to sell up. The Guardian was replaced by a key cutting emporium.
Much of the activity was actually carried out off Fleet street, in the myriad lanes criss crossing it. Shoe Lane and Bouverie street were as famous for the traffic jams they caused as the output of their inhabitants – The Sun and the Evening Standard. Vast reels of newsprint, piled high on heavy lorries, would block the street for hours on end – news would filter back through the traffic that the ‘bloody printers’ were working to rule again. Murdoch grew tired of their rules eventually and moved his entire emporium to Canary Wharf.
That in turn sounded the death knell for Mac’s cafe, venue for the endless fast-paced game of dominoes played by the blind compositers. Trained by the RNIB to read the metal font by touch, or deal with the tangle of wires that was a GPO switchboard, their memory and sensitivity of their fingers outpaced any sighted human being. Where do the unsighted find employment now? Does anybody know?
The bookbinders, illuminators, cartoonists, pamphleteers, scriveners, tanners, stationers, papermakers, marblers, journalists and essayists, reviewers and editors, drunks and stringers that enabled many a pub landlord to retire in grand style to Benidorm have all gone. It was said at one time that you could walk from one end of Fleet Street to the other in a downpour without getting wet, if you went from one pub to another fast enough…
The Birmingham Post, the only paper to heed the government’s call and produce a source of news during the great strike of 1955 has gone; its roost turned into a Pawnbroker’s. Mac’s? That became a Starbucks. Greasy spoons and vast lumps of bread pudding, spiced within an inch of its life, hold little appeal for the skinny latte crowd at Goldman Sachs. Try asking one of its clients what the # symbol means. They will say ‘Simple, that’s a hashtag’. Those old boys with their dominoes could have told you that it was a font shorthand for libre pondo, a measure of weight. The ‘Stab in the Back’, watering hole for the Mirror crowd, might well be nicknamed the ‘Stab in the gut‘ now……a Pizza emporium for those with cast iron constitutions. Even the ‘Gentlemen Ranters‘, the web site aka ‘the last pub in Fleet street’ gave up trying to persuade their ageing colleagues to contribute their memories.
You could have thought that Fleet Street, as was, had completely perished.
However, one last newspaper that you may never have heard of, had continued to run their London office in fleet Street. The Sunday Post. In the 1950s, when the newspaper was confined largely to Scotland, sales of the Sunday Post were so high that it was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the newspaper with the highest per capita readership penetration of anywhere in the world.
The BBC is reporting today that ‘the Dundee-based Sunday Post, closes its London office on Friday’.
Not strictly true. But that is what passes for journalism today. It’s ‘near enough’. Copy and paste. Copy and paste.
What has happened is that the last two London based journalists for the paper, Gavin Sherriff and Darryl Smith, have been made redundant.
D. C. Thomson, publishers of the Sunday Post are keeping the offices on for their advertising staff – but you have to go to an old school journalist to find that out.
‘Guinness Book of Records’? Ah yes, used to be proudly based at 107, Fleet Street. Ensuring that outrageous claims were corroborated and truthfully reported. That has now turned into furnished ‘serviced offices’ where you can attempt to impress your clients with your sumptuous offices – on a shoestring…
Exaro had a foothold in number 107 Fleet Street, until penury forced them out.
- David
August 5, 2016 at 12:54 pm -
I used to know Pelham Pound who had worked as a journalist in Fleet Street. he said it was mostly drinking in the pubs. He had to flee london, as he was a friend of Stephen Ward when the Profumo affair broke. One of his sons is now a Labour MP. I know one of his younger sons, indeed it was he who was with me when we thought we had seen a 45 year old Martin Allen in Brompton cemetery. He later worked for BBC radio in Regents Street.
- Bandini
August 5, 2016 at 12:57 pm -
Shoot me, please!!!
- Bandini
- Ho Hum
August 5, 2016 at 1:19 pm -
- Bandini
August 5, 2016 at 1:31 pm -
Sign me up to Desperate David’s Pie Eaters Club! Not sure what they’re filled with exactly but fairly certain the brown sludge inside has a bovine behind it. Free ‘spy camera’ too. Send postal order or stamps.
- Bandini
- Ho Hum
August 5, 2016 at 1:21 pm -
/sighs deeply. Will this wretched mobile app will ever post a reply in the right place?
- Demetrius
August 5, 2016 at 1:44 pm -
Back in the 50’s it was an interesting place, not least The Olde Cock Tavern. Mine’s a double with a pint of best.
- Matt Quinn
August 5, 2016 at 2:41 pm -
The Sunday Post is, or rather was, a staple of Scottish life. Home to the legendary Oor Wullie and The Broons. Jute Jam and Journalism were once what its home town of Dundee were best known for. Nowadays they (an elite minority that is) just sit around designing computer games all day. But I’ve not bought a physical newspaper in years and probably wouldn’t know if they withdrew ‘the Post’. We have to buy boxes of ‘puppy training pads’ to line the cat’s litter box with these days… They’re actually very good! Much better than newspaper!
Dundee is a place north of Watford incidentally, of which there are many on the British Isles… London seems unaware of this.
I’m not sure the unsighted were ever employed in great proportion at Fleet Street. Most of them live nowhere near there and could never afford to live in London anyway. ‘The unsighted’ were among the first groups that were rendered unemployable as, a few decades ago, unemployment became ‘a price worth paying’ for the prosperity in one small corner of this allegedly-united Kingdom. The last legs are being pulled off that particular spider as places (far more worthy of mourning than Fleet St) such as Blindcraft and Remploy, themselves vestiges of places like the old ‘blind Asylums’, fade into obscurity. Supported employment for the less-able, along with credible employment prospects for many of the general population are sacred cows that got made into hamburgers a long time ago!
For me, London became an irrelevance over 30 years ago. My ‘time’ (traineeship) with Thames Television was served. And I was ‘mad’ to give up my secure job and nice flat near Queen’s Club to return to a Glasgow tower block. Half-a-decade later the writing was on the wall for Thames whilst I was moving out to the country. A short time after that even the Thames building was no more. It seems I threw a six on that roll, many of my older colleagues effectively never worked again. My scribbling colleagues over on Fleet Street were seeing the beginnings of similar ends… I at least have been able to keep a roof over my head all these years.
It seems there are creative industries outside London; it’s just that nobody seems to have told London that either!
We’ve refused service on London shoots now since 2011; actually we don’;t work anywhere inside the London LEZ. It’s become more bother than it’s worth to go into battle with the city’s congestion charging and traffic policies, the mis-educated gorillas that steward places such as Canary Warf, the impenetrably-accented foreigners dressed as quasi-policemen who know-not the law of the land but are supposedly there to uphold it… The very offices that are supposed to assist with film making in the city seem to view every shoot as a fleecing opportunity.
But one of the last straws came for me some years ago while working in the city. After a healthy meal and a few pints at the end of a long day we (naturally) offered the ‘local’ Production Assistant a lift back to her digs in the taxi we were taking back to our hotel. – To cut a long and tearful story short, it turned out she had none! The young lady in question lived on the south Coast. On her wages she could not afford to commute to London not could she afford digs. So, when she could find work she slept rough through the week, pulling herself together in station toilets for the days’ labour. And returning home to her toddler-son and his Father at weekends. – This was the life of a 30-something honours graduate making her way in London!
We, of course, ensured the young lady in question was billeted with one of our girls; and were only too glad to do so. And the next day I went to read the riot act to the two worthless public-school Hooray Henries that employed her. – Neither of these two psychos could have given a flying fart about their employee’s plight. Nor, actually, could they have done her job for her! Their only skill, talent and training had come in the form of cheques from rich-daddies bank accounts. Rogues and charlatans, but that’s London for you.
I had first seen a similar ‘issue’ some fifteen years previously, van drivers sleeping in their vehicles, cleaners and security guards ‘living’ in cupboards… It was shameful and shocking then; it was interesting but deeply disturbing to see how prosperity at the expense of others was ‘creeping’. London has been eating itself for decades… The London authorities have turned the city into one huge casino-estate. And even the rats of the BBC are leaving!
You might discover a few last-threads of Journalism at No 89 Fleet Street, headquarters of the British Association of Journalists of which I’ve been a member for many years. I’ve often wondered why in God’s name our subs are paying to have them holed up there of all places!
- DtP
August 5, 2016 at 3:35 pm -
Ah man, thanks for that. I’ll pop a pint behind the bar for you!
- Mudplugger
August 6, 2016 at 9:45 pm -
Your opinion on that abysmal place they call London rings very true with me too. In my days as a self-employed consultant based Oop North, I would take on ‘Martini jobs’ – ‘anytime, any place, anywhere’, but with the one exception of London, where a team of wild horses, or even the lure of easy lucre, could not drag me – I turned down one contract in Central London which, 20 years ago, would have netted me £250k in a year but, even as a parsimonious, dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman, I never found that counter-intuitive decision hard to take.
An onion may rot from the outside, but the capital does the reverse and you need to stay well clear of its centre, even to its M25 skin, to retain your own sanity, integrity and self-respect.
The occupants of a mad-house usually don’t know that they are mad, it’s only when they start to realise it’s a mad-house that they’re starting on the road to recovery. Those who defend that god-forsaken place have a long road to travel before any early signs of recovery may be seen.- Matt Quinn
August 6, 2016 at 10:00 pm -
There is a wee rub to this in that occasionally, just occasionally, I miss the place!
Summer Sunday afternoons with my feet up on the windowsill panes flung streetward and one of those newspaper thingies on my lap… Gentle clip-clopping from behind the gates of Queen’s… (My flat was almost-next to their back-gate.) Ringing and grumbling from the streets… There was a Church (St Andrews appropriately enough) at the end of the road opposite. Once (via the Walkman miracle) I managed to hear Kate Bush sing the words “Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park” exactly as I passed the statue on my way to work. It was a lovely November morning. Once, I pulled up on my bicycle at traffic lights next to an ancient Austin van with Budgie cages in the back. The Driver looked just like James Hunt! – My colleagues at work were able to inform me it was!
The place I remember is long gone. Actually, many of them are.
- tdf
August 7, 2016 at 1:42 am -
“London never sleeps, it just sucks
The life out of me, and the money from my pocket
London always creeps, showbiz hugs
The life out of me, have some dignity honey
Euston, Paddington, train station please
Make the red lights turn green, endlessly
My black cab rolls through the neon disease
Endlessly, endlessly
London never sleeps, it just sucks
The life out of me, show some dignity honey”
- tdf
- windsock
August 7, 2016 at 8:03 am -
“you need to stay well clear of its centre, even to its M25 skin, to retain your own sanity, integrity and self-respect.”
I am getting a tad tired of the ubiquitous London bashing here and on other blogs. We are not all “metropolitan elites” – nor are we all unfriendly, stuck up or wealthy. Some of us are as much opposed to the rulings we get from one mile down the road and work co-operatively to make life better for each other on the little money we have that does not stretch as far in London as it would in Yorkshire.
I stay here because I have one of the best hospitals in the country for my condition within walking distance; because cheap tickets for stimulating theatre are easily available; because you can seek out little pubs that are not tourist traps that are heaven; because there are people here who always have a story. We’re not all snobs, toffs, chancers, bankers, lawyers, rip-off merchants and scumbags. We are people just like you (in fact, we are the majority in London – we just don’t have the power)/
- David
August 7, 2016 at 8:33 am -
@windsock, Well said, “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Chelsea is a village, our cottage hospital is Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, and I know a lot of the staff there. We have small local hostelries, many of them have been here for hundreds of years. Even a local pub where Oscar Wilde used to drink regularly.
Everyone says Good Morning-Good Afternoon, and Good Evening, even to strangers. Kings Road has eccentrics, a man who walks around with two parrots, one on each shoulder. Molly Parkin in her flowing robes, and large hats. Maggie Smith passes the time of day, I walk with Felicity Kendal, a neighbour, in Battersea Park, I chat with the local eccentrics, and local tramps, Abramovich will stop me smiling all over his face, with some interesting tale. We are a community, something very rare in the UK these days.
We have our deserters who have moved abroad, but they turn up regularly moaning about the snobs living in Spain, or France, that they have to endure, as if they were cruise ship passengers, rather than ex-pats. No London has it’s faults, but all life is here.
- Bandini
August 7, 2016 at 11:29 am -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuocVLKdSqQ
Can one surmise that the ‘rich Russian businessman’ – the source of your previous ‘Putin is a paedo’ claptrap – is non other than Mr A? Crikey, you may yet see some of that secret service action you so crave! - Matt Quinn
August 7, 2016 at 12:55 pm -
Is that right? Aye? “Tired of life”? – Very much an elitist view from the much-overrated Johnston (Samuel, not Boris for those watching in colour). Quaintly delusional now and as much a relic as Lionheart on cassette… Actually rather more so.
For various reasons – mostly concerned with gaining an education – I’ve had to read much of that damnable stuffed-shirt’s tedious history-distorting scribbling. Johnston and his cohorts are notable mainly for their capacity to romanticise their own largely unearned and worthless existences as well as the grinding misery off which they grew turgid and ridiculous. I am unconvinced that Johnston was ever “running about this town a very poor fellow” – No more than I believe that Ian Duncan Smith (the former having seemingly influenced the latter) has any real perspective on signing on. Neither has any honest grasp on the realities of poverty; actually I don’t think either has any real grasp of honesty. And both are mere exemplars.
…A quote from that tedious old fraud is always a bad start!
I assume those who wax lyrical about the place can actually afford a bed to sleep in and/or go home to their loved ones at night after a hard day’s work. There are, I believe, a few old stalwarts that managed to maintain controlled rents and are thus able to create an illusion of genteel poverty in which to self-indulge. …And such a thing as London weighting. Not that it seems to work well these days.
It is perhaps human nature to try and reconcile one’s own misery and/or justify one’s own excess.
But you might find the reality of being the third generation of your family not to have any prospect of meaningful work – let alone a wage you can actually live off and build a life on – a bit more daunting than making ends meet in the big smoke. The reality is the great swathes of this country are post-industrial wastelands, the people abandoned and sold down the river… And increasingly having the few pieces of vestigial support pulled from under them as the gamblers and chancers of that fetid square mile and supporting environs pull ever-more greedily at the remains of what once was a great Britain.
The glaring point of my example being that my colleague, a young working mother in her 30s who had worked hard for her degree, could not afford to live in London, could not afford digs in London could not afford to commute to the place yet could not find work elsewhere… And I think she cannot have been unique! As I say, this sort of thing was despicable and disgusting 20 or 25 years ago when it was ‘only’ Van Drivers, Cleaners and Security Guards that were caught in the trap. But it’s a creeping greed that infests that den where the only real work going on is not properly rewarded, and those that do well are, by and large, just Poker Players. How well are these people embraced by any notion of ‘community’? – Not at all!
To me, the comical name-dropping above speaks volumes of just how disconnected from reality London is. The casual notion that “local tramps” are just part of the colour. A lifestyle chose as validly as one of the ludicrous Molly Parkin’s hats. – Do you perhaps imagine they retire at night to some Womble-like underground burrow where they can settle down ‘far away from the cold night air
with one enormous chair’? Or possibly they are rounded up at night by kindly Salvation Army ladies protected by brass-blowing gentlemen to the tune of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’?Fliss Kendal will I know pick up and carry a bag of cables without being asked. One might hope the same of Maggie Smith, though it would be ungallant to let her. Neither lady seems unpleasant (I have met both, though each decades ago), quite the reverse. But I’m afraid the lives they lead and are part of are inescapably charmed and something of a fanciful unreality. Abramovich? Seriously?? We are supposed to be in some way impressed or perhaps kautau to this image???
London leads the way in the agenda that seemingly seeks to divide society and drive it back to (at least) GeoVictWardian levels of inequality and human misery edged with panem et circensus for an ever-shrinking few. Whilst I feel sure it would horrify some of the characters, the people you describe are merely ‘tin gods’ on an alter. And the picture you paint of this ‘community’ is quite unrealistic; ludicrous, Chelsea through the gaps in the circus tent!
The ‘London as a series of villages’ picture has been painted before. – The reality of living in an actual village can be quite unpleasant, like many of the cities of the dis-united kingdom, many of them are post-industrial wastelands too with the demise of industries such as mining and agriculture. – You can argue this as ‘progress’, but people still need jobs. London (where much of this is controlled from) sees only gambling chips and small change.
For me there was a moment sometime over three decades ago when I could no longer look myself in the eye of a London morning. My job in London was to stand there with a camera recording events and saying nothing – just being invisible and not noticed. Maybe people thought I too was an inanimate machine? For they (politicos mostly, yuppie and dodgy geezers some) were quite unguarded at times to the extent their dirty-rotten nature made me sick to my stomach. – I travelled (at company expense) back to Glasgow once every fortnight. I saw the gaps opening up and, mindful of them, decided I could not remain a part of the problem.
I’m afraid the rest of these islands is by no means ‘tired of living’, it’s just tired of feeding the cuckoo in the nest and bored and immune to its squawking! London deserves and can expect little sympathy. It is just a casino-town after all. A place that for the past few decades at least (and probably much longer) has lived and ‘prospered’ largely on asset-stripping the rest of the country! – Of course it’s not been averse to eating itself either; which is why the bemoaned street of shame is the way it is today…
London… A fleecing on every corner, working people sleeping rough, spikes in doorways to prevent even a few hours rest and a damned-good hosing down of a winter’s morning so as not to spoil the illusions.
Life, such as it is, really happens elsewhere.
- David
August 7, 2016 at 1:24 pm -
Extreme poverty is far less ‘in your face’ outside London, but it’s still there. Outside London the rich and the poor live separate lives, never crossing each others path. The large country houses, with their long driveways, and locked gates separate them from the poor. In London the rich and the poor, not only live, side by side, but actually ‘talk’ to each other.
London folk, both rich, and poor, are far more down to earth, far more pragmatic, that those you reside permanently outside the Capital. The children of the super wealthy, off to their night club at the end of the driveway to kensington Palace, (where Prince Harry has a tunnel linking it from the Palace, to the nightclub, first built for Princess Margaret), I see going into the local Council housing estates to buy their drugs.
London folk are also far more generous to the homeless, they talk to them, give them money, food, etc. Something I see far less of outside London.
- Matt Quinn
August 7, 2016 at 1:44 pm -
“Extreme poverty is far less ‘in your face’ outside London, but it’s still there.”
Strawman argument – I never suggested otherwise.
“London folk are also far more generous to the homeless, they talk to them, give them money, food, etc. Something I see far less of outside London.”
Aye… Right… That’s why there are spikes in the ground and ‘hosedowns’ (which I’ve witnessed myself) – Human beings literally hosed off the streets like dog turds… Keep it mate, just keep it.
- David
August 7, 2016 at 1:56 pm -
I think you will find they are people who have set up home in London from other parts of the UK, where the Yorkshire attitude of ,’anyone who isn’t working, for what ever reason, should be punished’, seems to prevail. I guarantee that anywhere outside London, including the Cities, has a far less generous view of the poor, and the homeless, than Londoners have. Where those spikes have been set up, other Londoners have protested, and had them removed.
- David
- Matt Quinn
- windsock
August 7, 2016 at 10:26 pm -
Your argument is not so much with the city itself, but with those who would treat it as their fiefdom. There are those of us from the. er “lower orders” who try to act as a counterweight to them Do not dismiss us – we are an equally valid picture of London.
- David
- The Blocked Dwarf
August 7, 2016 at 1:02 pm -
Not sure which worries me the most, the rampant Londonophobia (probably from people who think marmite tastes good) or the fact I am in agreement with David.
Probably the latter….did Hull freeze over and no one thought to inform me?
- Matt Quinn
August 7, 2016 at 1:40 pm -
Why would you assume I have any opinion about Marmite? – As for Londonophobia… No. Nobody’s scared of it. The world is simply waking up to the alternatives. Having actually experienced the place for half-a-decade, I am simply not impressed with it. And less and less so – we haven’t even made the once-annual Christmas shopping trip down there in at least a dozen years; it became such a non-pleasurable experience.
No Hull hasn’t frozen over. And you will find that if you sail north, even from there, you do not actually fall off the edge of the world.
Is there any irony in my becoming wistful for the smell of hot WD40 escaping from the print rooms of the old Evening Times/Glasgow Herald buildings in Mitchell St? – Or even more wistful for Jamieson’s newsagent that the ‘new’ (1980s) print rooms in George St seemed to displace? – My start in professional life having been made at Strathclyde Uni’s TV Studio at the Turnbull building in George St… I also rather wish I had been able to secure an apprenticeship at STV rather than Thames. Not that I think that would have made much difference… Save for the fact I wouldn’t now be speaking from experience.
- The Blocked Dwarf
August 7, 2016 at 2:43 pm -
Why would you assume I have any opinion about Marmite?
My bad, I thought you were British.
I worked in Scotland in the mid 80s, my abiding memory of the place is that beyond that it was warmer than expected a lot of the time, and that there weren’t actually Eskimos, was the H A T R E D. I write that embiggened and shouty because it was. No, not my hatred of the place infact I rather liked being in Edinburgh, any race that serves chips with HP as a matter of course has to have something going for it. And any town where I could drink 24/7…
No I am refering to the HATRED between Catholics and Protestants. The blind, drum beating, sash wearing, ‘purely symbolic heavy battons’ carrying, bowler hatted HATRED that seemed to pervade every aspect of life and I do mean every aspect. I’m told, by people who knew, that tarts shivering in the ‘heat’ of a June night would enquire after their prospective John’s denomination before getting into his car. “I’ll no suck danny cock” as some tangerine coloured (and I’m not refering to her suntan-outta-bottle) once expressed her own lines of religious demarcation.
I worked with street kids/young offenders and every one of them had been raised with their Mother’s Buckfast to HATE. I could list all the ‘Hate Crime’, as we are now are to call it, I witnessed but frankly, honestly, there are several incidents I have been trying to forget. Suffice to say, ‘Honor Killings’ aren’t just a Pakistani thing.
Maybe I’m judging Scotland harshly and unlike it’s first City , it’s second City was a hotbed of inter-Confessional tolerance where Green and Orange lived side by side on the keyboard in perfect harmo….oops getting my metaphors muddled…but somehow I doubt it. According to my Boss at the time, who grew up in there, ‘Galsgie’ was Edinburgh with the HP.
As to London. The first thing you learn when you live there is “NO ONE CARES”. That cuts, like an old school East End Villain, both ways. No one cares if you’re sleeping rough or haven’t eaten in days. But also no one cares you walk down the street in your jim jams with a parrot on your shoulder trailing bunting behind you whilst proclaiming ‘Oh Mr Parkinson, what-a-to-do!’ in Swahili .
- The Blocked Dwarf
August 7, 2016 at 2:45 pm -
Bloody Ed. “Glasgie was Edinburgh wi’out the HP”.
- The Blocked Dwarf
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Matt Quinn
- Bandini
- David
- Matt Quinn
- DtP
- Devonshire Dozer
August 5, 2016 at 2:45 pm -
Ah – The Cheshire Cheese! The only place on Fleet Street where you could actually get decent beer – in the form of (proper) Marstons’ Pedigree.
- Reason
August 5, 2016 at 4:00 pm -
Didn’t Murdock move to Wapping rather than Canary Wharf?
- Kevin Monk
August 5, 2016 at 5:03 pm -
I always assumed that the papers were located there because of its proximity to The Royal Courts of Justice.
- Jimbob McGinty
August 5, 2016 at 6:36 pm -
New technology baffles pissed old hack
Never occurred to me that Private Eye’s Street of Shame column would one day be nominally anachronistic - Jimbob McGinty
August 5, 2016 at 7:01 pm -
I wonder when we will be free from the tyranny of ignorance that is our present Murdochracy, and what terrible beast will replace it. *wistful sigh*
- wiggia
August 6, 2016 at 9:42 am -
I “worked” in and around Fleet St after leaving school in the late fifties until mid sixties before going and getting a proper job !
It was a fascinating place especially at night, anyone who was lucky enough to see the enormous presses in action and hot metal being prepared for the rollers could not help but impressed, it was still a big business which is why the unions could and did exert almost nightly pressure for more money for sod all and get it , and where lots of people wearing suits would be wandering around until the pay was ready and collect and go home having done nothing at all, overmanning was a fine art in Fleet St.
Other items spring readily to mind, the amazing subsidised Times canteen, the Guardian chapel office that was a conduit for back of the lorry goods, the tramps who slept over the hot air vents in the pavement in winter, the noise and smell of the presses when running, and of course the smell of cash that was paid to everyone who signed of with Mickey Mouse or similar.
It couldn’t last with falling sales even then and Murdoch finished it by finally getting digital printing into Fleet St, the last major print centre in the world still using hot metal and then moving to fortress Wapping, the beginning of the end.
Macs cafe by the way was rubbish but the only place open in the early morning unless you had the time to go round the corner to Smithfield market that had its own eateries and a pub open.
- tdf
August 7, 2016 at 1:38 am -
‘Guinness Book of Records’? Ah yes, used to be proudly based at 107, Fleet Street. Ensuring that outrageous claims were corroborated and truthfully reported. ”
Lol.
- David
August 7, 2016 at 9:40 am
{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }