Excerpt from Fleet Street in Seven Centuries: Being a History of the Growth of London Beyond the Walls Into the Western Liberty, and of the Fleet Street to Our Time
That is not quite true, but let us grant cheerfully that the newspapers have made the modern fame of the street. They have familiarised its name in the most distant corners of the world, and will introduce this book to a wider public than is to be found in the City, though in pages crowded with so much incident Mr. Bell allots but small space to the news paper press. And the street is linked with its staple industry in a manner more intimate than can be claimed for any other distinctive area of London. The Fleet Street Man, wherever you meet him, is marked down as a journalist, so completely has every other association been forgotten in our day.
The City of London is very old, and in its long unbroken history the newspapers are but things of yesterday. Herein you will read less of what Fleet Street is than of what it was, and there are probably few who will not agree that its record over seven centuries past rivals in interest the busy, hustling life of the street to-day. Fleet Street became in the mediaeval age the chief western highway into the City, the connecting landway with the king’s palace and the courts at Westminster. Its story is very largely that of the City itself. But the develop ment of the great Ward of Farringdon Without - that is to say, without the walls-differed very greatly from that of the City within the walls, and in tracing that development from the time of the first settlements of ecclesiastics in the then rural suburb Mr. Bell has done a work that will be valued by all to whom the fascination of London’s past makes an appeal.
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