Fleet Street

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Fleet Street is named for the Fleet River which ran near here. Popularly known as the Fleet Ditch, the narrow river rand from a source near Hampstead, but became horribly polluted on its way into the city, and was littered with dead dogs, sewage, offal and rubbish. A strange story (from British History Online) tells us that '...In 1763, a drunken barber, from Bromley, in Kent, was found in Fleet Ditch, standing upright and frozen to death.'

In more recent years, Fleet Street was the home of British journalism, though the likes of the Telegraph, The Daily Express and the Daily Mirror have long since gone, with many publications decamping to Wapping to the east of the City of London, or to Canary Wharf in Docklands.

The street is also well known for its legendary 'Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Sweeney Todd. Whether such a person ever existed is much contested by scholars, who state that there is next to no evidence of his being a real person.

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