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  The writing of words had been considered as much a workmanlike trade as their printing – a journalist was expected to have served a long apprenticeship, preferably starting out as a fourteen-year-old postboy – but as airy-fairy young Oxbridge aesthetes found themselves in demand as feature writers, a career in Fleet Street became both fashionable and lucrative. The Mail’s gossip columns, typically penned either by arch young lordlings or their Evelyn Waugh-style hangers-on, spawned the first columnists: ‘the most feared and courted members of society’ in the word of Robert Graves.

  Northcliffe’s journalists were the first to make their excuses and leave – that ‘truth about the nightclubs’ story began: ‘Women dressed as men, men as women . . . dim lights and drowsy odours.’ Our current tabloids’ unappealingly hypocritical prurience can also be traced to the twenties – the Sunday Express would describe at length a lesbian novel, before its reviewer concluded: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this book.’ There were familiarly idiotic campaigns, too: apparently for a bet, Northcliffe undertook to change the nation’s diet within six months and for some time did indeed cajole ‘practically everyone’ into eating a horrid grey loaf called ‘Standard Bread’. The Daily Mail even introduced its own hat, a cross between a bowler and a homburg.

  By apeing the Mail, Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express trebled its readership to a million in just four years. The Daily Telegraph grew so plump with advertising that it was said a single issue burnt in a kitchen range would boil a pint kettle. By 1936 almost every home in Britain took a daily paper and half of them an evening one too: there were three evening dailies in London and each had circulations over 500,000. A third of households took two Sunday papers, journals whose combined circulation hit 15.7 million in 1937.

  But as more publications crowded into Fleet Street seeking a slice of a large and very tasty pie, so the competition spawned ever more ludicrous circulation wars. If all those rival newspaper bingo wars a few years back got on your wick, be grateful you weren’t around in the thirties. The Mail hired sky-writing planes to emblazon its name above the Derby Day crowds in letters half a mile high, and more or less bought the aviator Amy Johnson for its own commercial ends. Panicked by the Express’s success – the latter would be first through the two million mark – the Mail began to offer absurdly inflated competition prizes: it is no accident that the ‘You Have Won A Crossword Competition’ Chance card should have yielded players a generous £100 – the third most lucrative across both decks.

  The thirties was the age of extravagant lotteries – a resident of the Metroland suburb of Pinner won a lion which he kept in his back garden – and the newspapers didn’t hold back. In 1931 alone, the Mail paid out £125,000 in crossword prizes (over £3 million in today’s money), but soon even that wasn’t enough. Papers started canvassing door-to-door and giving away an insane variety of free gifts: flannel trousers, mangles, tea sets, the collected works of Dickens.

  The era also witnessed the birth of silly season stories, most notably a tedious obsession with the Loch Ness monster that in 1933 dominated the pages of those papers who chose to overlook the election as German chancellor of some Hitler chappie. But if you had to select one story to define British journalism of the age, you could do a lot worse than the one-man media circus of randy Reverend Harold Davidson, rector of Stiffkey – that’s what I said – in Norfolk.

  Found guilty in 1932 of many acts of unseemliness with young prostitutes, Davidson was defrocked, but chose to appeal and funded his own defence through a number of ill-advised publicity stunts. Fleet Street hacks, invited by the miscreant minister to Blackpool, were scarcely able to believe their luck as he wedged himself into a barrel on the beach and announced an intention to starve himself to death. Charged with attempted suicide he sued the Blackpool authorities for damages and won £382, before delighting the press pack once again with an appearance at a Bank Holiday fair on Hampstead Heath in the company of a dead whale. By the middle of the decade he was touring with circuses, and in the summer of 1937 stopped the Fleet Street presses one last time: that appearance in a threepenny lion-taming sideshow at Skegness was itself worth a tasty news-in-brief slot, but by being mauled to death therein the last century’s hottest gospeller guaranteed himself a final front-page splash.

  And yet behind all the free trousers and naughty vicars, Fleet Street’s political influence was inestimably more potent in those days – and without the need for any ‘It Was The Sun Wot Won It’ braggadocio. The conservative newspapers – as every notable one was – helped table the consensus that shaped London’s subsequent make-do-and-mend development, a consensus described thus by Robert Graves in 1939: ‘Never to do what the Russians had done and the Germans and Italians were doing – pull the house down and build up from new foundations – but to continue patching and riveting and bracing so long as it would stand.’

  When Fleet Street got on its soapbox, the authorities had to listen. The creation of the BBC in 1922 incited fury amongst press barons, convinced their sales would be adversely affected: by way of appeasement, the government forbade its new corporation from broadcasting news before 6 p.m. and anything at all on Sunday morning. When it broadcast live from the Derby the BBC was limited to transmitting the crowd’s cheers and the thumping of hooves: for the result you’d have to wait for the evening paper. And if a newspaper could persuade the whole nation to eat grey bread or wear a stupid hat, it could certainly steer their pencils towards a particular cross on the ballot paper. Especially if that cross was theirs: in 1929, the Express ran an ‘Empire Free Trade Crusade’ – a campaign which spawned the little red knight who still adorns its masthead – that saw four Empire Free Trade MPs elected in by-elections. More frightening, in 1935 the Mail came out in support of Mosley’s Blackshirts: its sister paper the Sunday Dispatch offered £1 prizes to readers who sent in postcards explaining, no doubt in fifteen words or fewer, ‘Why I Like The Blackshirts’. The habit of ennobling proprietors – the bosses of dailies Express, Mail and Telegraph were all made lords – was a mark of successive governments’ desperation to keep them on board.

  Yet even at the lofty high-water mark of its global importance, Fleet Street remained little more than a medieval alley: ‘A commonplace, dingy thoroughfare one might rightly call Grub Street’ wrote Country Life in 1922, complaining that New York and Paris housed its newspapers in far grander offices. That was the whole point, of course. Fleet Street sourced its first stories in the poky inns and coffee shops where Dr Johnson had held court, and later its seven pubs were the nation’s newsrooms. Overblown, lurid, sensationalist, hysterical – the qualities that defined good pub gossip were also those that sold papers. A good journalist needed his finger on the pulse, and if London was the heart of the Empire nowhere did that heart beat more loudly than Fleet Street. Promenading with Boswell one morning through the bracing, bucolic splendour of Greenwich Park, Dr Johnson turned to his companion and sighed, ‘Is this not very fine?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ returned Boswell, ‘but not equal to Fleet Street.’

  Johnson, who lived a wig’s throw from the street and surely had the area in mind when he coined his tired-of-life aphorism, instantly agreed. Fleet Street had always been at the centre of things – it was the only Monopoly street to be torched in the Great Fire – and in the thirties all human life was still there: P.E. Chappuis reflector manufacturers, the London Egg Exchange (swop you two cracked browns for a sunny side up), Bowker & King barge owners, Snow’s Sacramental Wine Company, two Lyons Corner Houses, half a dozen jewellers, the Salisbury Hotel, cigar merchants, legal booksellers, fancy drapers, stamp dealers – oh, and as well as the HQ of the World League Against Alcoholism, seven pubs. That was a lot of London for you to get tired of, but if you somehow did indeed fall foul of the good doctor’s maxim there was always the British Undertakers’ Association at No. 108.

  My grandfather worked for the Daily Telegraph for thirty-nine years, first as a forei
gn correspondent and then, for twenty post-war years, as a leader writer in some lofty office within those thick grey walls. Staring up at the huge clock leaning out perilously above me as I stepped out of the car I imagined him sidling gracefully beneath it into work, dapper as ever in his groomed goatee and bespoke three-piece. His journalistic career spanned Fleet Street’s golden age: so glamorous that his name was on occasion plastered across double-deckers, so handsomely rewarded that he was able to collect property with Monopoly-like nonchalance.

  I was still looking up at the clock when two guys in unbuttoned jackets, ID photo chains round their stubbled necks, emerged wearily from the main entrance and stood in the chilled darkness, rubbing eyes and arching back shoulderblades, until a minicab arrived to take them away. Vibrating with the first of many shivers – buttoning my shirt right up to the neck promoted modest retention of body heat at the expense of suggesting a serious personality disorder – I shuffled over and peered into the reception: though the listed lettering across its façade still read DAILY TELEGRAPH, in the covert fashion I’d begun to expect from London’s financial institutions the building now reluctantly identified itself as the offices of Goldman Sachs.

  It was the same just up the road at the magnificently megalomaniac Express building, all curved black glass and chrome like a Flash Gordon space station. Inside, a great silver starburst exploded figuratively across the lobby ceiling, and I wondered to what extent its own offices’ design had fuelled the paper’s traditionally grandiose delusions. Recalling all the larger-than-life characters who had swaggered in through those doors, all those bloody and very public circulation wars plotted out up there by loud men with cigars, it seemed disappointingly feeble that the building’s current incumbents couldn’t even whisper their names on a bell-plate.

  These days there are no long lunches or boozy benders, and nearly all of Fleet Street’s restaurants, along with a couple of its pubs, have been replaced by sanitised, globalised, de-alcoholised establishments catering for today’s hassled, frazzled office workers: McDonald’s, Coffee Republic, a pair of Prêt à Mangers, the inevitable trio of Starbucks. A lean and twitchy youth hunched jerkily past muttering complicated obscenities to the cold pavement – oh look, his shirt was buttoned right up to the neck – and a minicab tout tried to hit on me from the other side of the street.

  There were odd traces of the old days – a bell-plate faintly engraved ‘Irish Press’ but with ‘Bridge Security’ stickered stridently beneath it; a wall emblazoned with tiles spelling out DUNDEE EVENING TELEGRAPH and PEOPLE’S FRIEND – but many more of even older days. Fleet Street’s link with the church goes back 1,500 years, and trying to stamp off the cold up a short alley I found St Brides still at it (its steeple, Wren’s tallest, was the inspiration for the first tiered wedding cake). And though Snow’s Sacramental Wine might have gone, further down the road were the Churches Conservation Trust and the Protestant Truth Society. And after the priests – to be fair to Goldman Sachs, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and the rest – came the money men: Messrs C. Hoare, hoity-toity Fleet Street bankers since 1672, were still going, as were Coutts in a horrid concrete bunker over the road.

  Fleet Street was clinging stubbornly to its history, fighting a rearguard action against the office invasion. Yes, most of the retail outlets sold only service convenience, being places you dashed into on the way to work to drop something off which you dashed into again to pick up on the way home: Mr Minit, Snappy Snaps, a dry cleaner’s. But it was heartening to see a few offering products you couldn’t blithely stuff in a briefcase without a lot of practice: hedge trimmers, a ceiling fan, an improbably puffed up and reassuringly unfashionable Fred Perry ski jacket.

  El Vino’s, a wine bar which until legally obliged to in 1982 refused to serve women at all and only recently admitted any wearing trousers, was still pompously and ostentatiously present and incorrect; so too, down an especially tight alley, was the Cheshire Cheese, haunt of Johnson, Voltaire, Dickens and a parrot who on Armistice Night in 1918 pulled a hundred corks on the trot before dropping dead. The landlord had been unable to resist a ‘Ye Olde’ on the sign, but with a history like that I could just above forgive him.

  Even older was Prince Henry’s Room – a perfect half-timbered edifice whose robustly ornate five-hundred-year-old interior panelling bears the monogram of the future Henry VIII. Until 1901 its grand façade was completely hidden behind a vast billboard that winningly read,

  FORMERLY THE PALACE OF HENRY VIII AND CARDINAL WOLSEY

  HAIR CUTTING SALON – BRUSHING BY STEAM POWER.

  There was still a ground-floor barbers there in the thirties, in fact, and a still more memorable establishment at No. 153 down the other end of the road. Hairdressers have a well-chronicled weakness for abysmal puns when naming their business, but at Sweeney Todd’s of Fleet Street the joke was more forthright: not so much Curl Up and Dye as Curl Up and Die.

  I’m sure most of us are familiar with the story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a troubled trichologist who gave his eighteenth-century customers the ultimate shave before mincing them up in the basement for subsequent pastry-packaged resale. He was the only hairdresser for whom Head and Shoulders was a pie filling, the only businessman to appreciate the full scope of the phrase ‘tough customer’. Though generally conceded to have been cobblers, his legend is still ghastly enough to linger on in the minds of Londoners, most famously inspiring the Flying Squad’s rhyming-slang nickname. And in 1936 it would have been especially au courant: that year the fêted film-maker Tod Slaughter finally lived up to his name with a cheerfully candid interpretation of the Sweeney myth.

  ‘It’s only a story, sir,’ the proprietor of No. 153 would breeze slightly too cheerily, rasping his gleaming razor noisily back and forth across the strop. ‘I certainly won’t be slicing you from ear to ear and flogging your guts off under a crust at football matches. Now – plenty off the top?’ Gingerbread Cottage Forest Refuge, King Herod’s Kindergarten for Boys, the Umbrella Stand Elephant Sanctuary – it’s difficult to contrive a more unhappily named commercial venture. Only a London journalist would have found it funny.

  Fingers were at work on the celestial dimmer switch, but as dawn became morn it wasn’t getting any warmer. When I knocked on the window of the San Marco café the whistling old chap cleaning the espresso filters inside pointed at his watch with an apologetic shrug, and succumbing to one of those panic attacks that are the preserve of the underdressed I linked my rigid fingers behind my vibrating head and, hot wrists pressed to agonisingly frosted ears, hammered waywardly back to the car.

  It took fifteen minutes for my shuddering whimpers to peter out, and by then the shelf stackers were flinging cellophane packets about in the sandwich bars. Through one drooping eye I saw the first bus without an ‘N’ in front of its number deposit a trio of security guards; then my chin slumped gently to my chest before being jerked jarringly aloft by the Radio 4 pips bleeping me back to life.

  It was still only 6 a.m., yet the Fleet Street I woke to was logjammed with double-parked taxis, dropping off the serious earners, groomed and jaunty young men and women who bounded eagerly up to their lobby doors. The buzz-click of entryphones resounded up and down the road, and in the midst of an epic yawn I recognised precisely how much I would hate to force myself out of my bed, out of my bath, out of my door at this time every day. And it all seemed so sterile and unproductive, all this yah-ing into phones and scrolling endlessly through columns of coloured digits. Fleet Street’s dawn output might once have wrapped that evening’s fish and chips, but at least in the interim its black and white had been read all over. The earnings that were so definitively visible then were now invisible, and here were some of the otherwise invisible people who earned them. And here also, ambling towards me with an expression of innocent malice, was a traffic warden. My word they start early up here, I thought, waiting until his knuckles were poised to rap against the passenger window before sparking up the ignition and hangi
ng a terrific Kojak U-turn.

  Not many London thoroughfares have earned themselves a definite article in common parlance, and most of those have done so by virtue of their destination: the Great West Road is the great road to the west; the City Road terminates at the Square Mile’s northern edge; and thoroughfares to forgotten villages, royal monuments or fairgrounds are commemorated in roads Brompton, Charing Cross and Tottenham Court. That old road to Kent is awarded a ‘the’ by everyone except cartographers and John Waddington, but so is another on the Monopoly board – this one an exception to the destination rule.

  I don’t know why I’m bothering to try and build up some suspense here because I’m obviously talking about the Strand. Hard as it is to imagine it now, high above the waterline and never closer than 200 yards to the Embankment-narrowed river, the Strand was once a bridle path along the banks of the Thames; its name is derived from the Old Norse word for ‘beach’. Just as Fenchurch Street is Roman and Fleet Street Anglo-Saxon, so the Strand is the Monopoly board’s resident Viking.

  The last Norsemen lingered in the Strand long enough to see the son of King Cnut (and my, how those of us with an unsure touch on the keyboard pine for a return to Canute) buried in the church that is still known as St Clement Danes, but by the twelfth century the street was lined with gracious mansions for almost the entire mile of its length. The Cnuts made way, if you will, for the nobs. For sixteenth-century foreign visitors, the Strand – home to over half a dozen dukes or earls, a whopping 134-foot maypole and, now on your left, ladies and gents, London’s most central windmill – became a highlight of the guided tours that began at the Tower of London and ended at Whitehall. The Secretary of State’s official residence, next to Northumberland House, became known in Charles II’s era as No. 1, the Strand – London’s first numbered address.