Before newspapers, London's Fleet Street was known for tanneries, taverns and bishops
Fleet Street is shorthand for the British national press, but printers only arrived in the early 16th century. For centuries before that, the road beside the River Fleet was a mix of bishops' mansions, stinking tanneries, taverns and brothels, and in 1533 its public water conduit ran with wine for Anne Boleyn's coronation.
A route ran west from Ludgate by 200 AD, making this one of the oldest roads outside the original city. It was called Fleet Bridge Street in the 13th century and Fleet Street by the early 14th. Medieval prelates, among them the Bishops of Salisbury and St Davids, kept houses there, and a riot broke out around the Bishop of Salisbury's residence in 1392. Tanners used the river, and their waste led to a ban on dumping by the mid-14th century. One often-repeated record says Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for assaulting a friar on the street, though historians now doubt it.
Overcrowding prompted a royal ban on new building in 1580, which builders largely ignored. The Great Fire of 1666 gutted the eastern end as far as about Fetter Lane, despite efforts to use the river against it, and the special Fire Courts that settled property disputes sat at Clifford's Inn on the edge of the damage.
The 18th century brought colour of its own. An upper-class gang called the Mohocks terrorised passers-by, and Mrs Salmon's Waxworks opened in 1711, with gruesome and darkly comic scenes that William Hogarth loved to visit. In 1763 supporters of John Wilkes burned a jackboot in the roadway to mock the Earl of Bute.
Industry faded after the Fleet was put underground in 1766. By the 20th century most national newspapers were based here, until the 1980s, when News International's move to cheaper premises at Wapping led much of the trade to leave. The street also features in Charles Dickens and is home to the fictional barber Sweeney Todd.
Source: Fleet Street
