London Letter: Newspapers aren’t the only ghosts haunting an increasingly vacant Fleet Street

Most of the journalists have been gone for 30 years but moving to this part of London a couple of months ago, it was still something of a shock to find that you cannot buy a newspaper on Fleet Street. It is not just that there are no newsagents, which have been going the way of tobacconists for a long time but there are no convenience stores or miniature branches of the big supermarket chains.

In fact, if you walk from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill and back again, you will find little commercial activity of any kind as you pass one boarded-up premises after another. If you pass anyone along the way, they are more likely to be tourists trailing back from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Strand than someone who works on Fleet Street.

Most of the big newspapers left in the 1980s when Rupert Murdoch led the flight to Wapping and broke the printing unions. Some news agencies and smaller publications stayed until the early years of this century but the last journalists left six years ago when the Sunday Post moved its editorial staff out. DC Thomson, which publishes the Beano, still has an office on Fleet Street but it houses only non-editorial staff.

When the newspapers moved out, firms like Freshfields, Deloitte and Goldman Sachs moved in but now they are leaving too, killing off the coffee shops, bars and other businesses that depended on their staff. The street’s two great art deco landmarks, the Daily Express building with its curved glass, chromium and black Vitrolite frontage and the Egyptian-themed Daily Telegraph building, are both currently empty.

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Half-empty office

Across the street, the Reuters and Press Association building designed by Lutyens, which used to house The Irish Times London office, is a half-empty office building. The Daily Chronicle building next door is being demolished along with five other historic buildings to make way for a new “Justice Quarter” including a police headquarters.

The coronavirus lockdowns and their lingering symptom of working from home struck the final blow to some of the street’s oldest businesses including the Tipperary, London’s oldest Irish pub. El Vino’s (formally El Vino but never referred to by that name) has been opening four days a week but will be open Monday to Friday from next week.

Long, dark and wood-panelled, El Vino’s looks more or less the same as it did in its heyday with racks of wine bottles up to the ceiling behind the bar and a brighter area at the back with tables, some tucked into nooks. Notorious for its refusal to serve women at the bar until the 1980s, El Vino’s was the most famous of the numerous watering holes that nourished generations of thirsty journalists.

In his memoir A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, Alan Watkins describes the role enjoyed by those fortunate enough to occupy the post of the editor’s drinking companion.

“This was an ancient office in Old Fleet Street comparable to one in a medieval (or, for that matter, a post-medieval) court. The incumbent’s duty was to accompany the editor to El Vino’s or the pub whenever the editor felt like having a drink. Accordingly, his work at the paper could not be too important or take up too much of his time and, most of all, he could present no threat to the editor’s position,” he writes.

`Ounce of emotion’

Watkins, who died in 2010, worked at various times as a political columnist for the Observer, the Sunday Express, the New Statesman, the Sunday Mirror and the Evening Standard. His first editor, John Junor at the Express, had a number of journalistic maxims that captured the spirit of the old Fleet Street:

An ounce of emotion is worth a ton of fact.

No one ever destroyed a man by sneering.

Always look forward, never back.

Everybody is interested in sex and money.

When in search of a subject, turn to the royal family.

It is not libellous to ask a question.

That last maxim is not necessarily true but Junor’s principles are still those that drive the British press and which can make it so sharp and lively and also so trivial and duplicitous.

Fleet Street is heading for more changes, with plans for a “business investment district” and talk of turning the Express building into a “publicly accessible cultural destination with social and educational outreach”. We can only guess what Junor would have made of that.