Fleeting Fleet Street:
All shifted out
A Memoir – published January 2022
This is my perspective from working as a general reporter near the bottom of the pile on British national newspapers … but hopefully with some top insights into absorbing events.
It is intended to be a riveting, eye-witness account of the last years when national papers based in or near London’s Fleet Street featured so prominently in the national consciousness.
Their circulations hovered at all-time highs. The term Fleet Street was synonymous with national newspapers.
I was struggling sometimes, but tenacious as I held down hundreds of reporting shifts. Trying to combine that with family life and children too.
I survived precariously for more than a decade on a string of titles including the Daily Star, the Sunday Express and the Daily Mirror … and encountered a host of celebrities and politicians including singer Madonna, cricketer Ian Botham and prime minister John Major.
In the 1990s I kept news of my family and two boys semi-secret. I did not want newsdesks to know that I could not do some late-notice shifts because I was baby or toddler minding.
The memoir describes the time from the mid-1980s when most papers shifted further away from their old, ageing main buildings. New print technology was a prime factor for the moves.
In those 1980s most reporters still worked on manual typewriters, called in stories from red public phone boxes, indulged in black cabs for stories round the city (expenses were generous) and often boozed like there was no tomorrow.
By the time I stopped working for nationals, word processors or computers and mobile phones were ubiquitous. It was a more sober world in the new millennium.
If the world of news inspires you, I hope you’ll be immersed in my trip down those years …
Below my 1987 London Daily News pass.
If you click on this link, you can read a sample from the memoir: Chapter Two: