The end of the Fleet Street era

The last of the great news organisations that once dominated Fleet Street has left, signifying the end of an era. By Conor Brady

Fleet Street was partly a state of mind, partly a geographic location. In the warren of backstreets, courts and laneways that run through the area of the City of London known as "EC4" small publishing houses and magazine offices proliferated for more than a century.

But "Fleet Street" extended as the era of print in Britain reached its zenith. In the 1950s, The Times moved to its then state-of-the-art office block at Blackfriars, overlooking the river. The Guardian went to the impossibly-distant Gray's Inn Road. Yet "The Street" was deemed to extend to these new colonies that gave their enthusiastic loyalty to King Newsprint.

It is all gone now. Definitively so, from last week, with the announcement that the last surviving news organization on Fleet Street – Reuters – is to move to Canary Wharf, following the trail first marked out by Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s.

If you come up Fleet Street from Ludgate Circus, the Reuters Building is unmistakable. It is on your left, No 85, more or less opposite where The Daily Telegraph once stood and a few yards short of what was once Beaverbrook's Express building.

It is a beautiful building, designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens. Its granite façade and the brass plates by the door mark it as someplace special – iconic of an era of elegance and confidence. Now after 66 years, Reuters is moving to a new building in the docklands.

The wonder is that it took so long. There is something particularly poignant about anything that is the last of its species. If a building could have feelings, No 85 Fleet Street must have felt a bit like the last brown bear in the Pyrenees over the past decade. Its tribe had all vanished. Yet it remained in its traditional, familiar place, perhaps wondering if they would come back again. They didn't, of course. So eventually, a time comes to follow.

I worked in No 85 Fleet Street in the early 1970s. Reuters owned the building but it was always known as "PA" – from the Press Association. It was an extraordinary ferment of coming and going, of activity and excitement. One could almost bottle the adrenalin that flowed up and down the stairs and along the corridors.

The Irish Times had an office on the third floor. It was tiny. But we loved the atmosphere that was generated by the presence of so many other news organisations. The Scottish newspapers, the Welsh and the English regional dailies all had their offices there. We railed when the Irish Times was bracketed as a "regional" newspaper in the pecking order by functionaries at Westminster, Downing Street and elsewhere.

But there were advantages to being with the pack. We got to places and events to which even the most powerful of the "foreign" press were not invited. So we slummed it happily with The Glasgow Herald or The Birmingham Post.

In truth, it was a bit of a comedown from our earlier office (shared with The Cork Examiner) at New Printing House Square. There we rubbed shoulders with The Cape Times, The Melbourne Age, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of India, The New York Times and others. The men from The New York Times all wore button-down shirts and the women dressed in severe business-suits, black high-heeled shoes and pearl earrings. They rarely deigned to speak to the rest of us.

Fleet Street was an extraordinary place in those days. It bustled with newsmen and women. Many were unknown to each other. But there were the celebrities. Peregrine Worsthorne was stepping out of a cab here. Murray Sayle (in combat jacket) was hailing another there. Was that Majorie Proops going into the Mirror?

Taxis slewed around in U-turns, rushing reporters and photographers in and out from jobs. Boys on bicycles sped across the pavements with precious negatives or photo-prints for the various newsdesks.

The lunchtime pubs were an institution in themselves. Photographers and cameramen liked the "King Lud" by Ludgate Circus. TE Uttley and Gery Lawless held rival court in the "Kings and Keys" where the guv'nor was Mark O'Donnell, from Limerick.

"El Vino" always seemed to be filled with sophisticated women who worked in fashion magazines and young men in suits who sold advertising. "The Cheshire Cheese" was celebrated for good food in an era when pub catering was generally best avoided.

The open-top tour buses still go down Fleet Street and the guides tell the visitors that this was where the British newspaper industry had its Mecca. I noticed the last time I was there that they tend to stop at the Reuters Building at No 85 – presumably in the hope that someone might catch a glimpse of one of the few surviving aboriginals of "The Street".

Even they will be gone in a couple of months. Fleet Street will be no different from any of the dreary thoroughfares of the City, lined with banks and brokering houses, punctuated here and there by Starbucks and Pret-a-Manger outlets. There will only be ghosts where once there were journalists, photographers, tipsters, printers, messengers – that whole eccentric civilisation that grows up around a newspaper.

Conor Brady is Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD, where he lectures in modern media