Fleet Street

English

Etymology

From the (now underground) River Fleet, over which much of Fleet Street runs.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈfliːt ˌstɹiːt/

Proper noun

Fleet Street

1. A street in Westminster borough, London, England, United Kingdom, that runs from Ludgate Hill to the Strand; formerly the centre of English journalism.
2. (metonymically, collective) English journalism or journalists as a group.
   • 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London, New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

     "They will say that you are an infernal liar and a scientific charlatan, exactly as you and others said of me." "In the face of photographs?" "Faked, Summerlee! Clumsily faked!" "In the face of specimens?" "Ah, there we may have them! Malone and his filthy Fleet Street crew may be all yelping our praises yet."

   • 1981, Richard Howard Stafford Crossman, Janet P. Morgan, The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, page 141:

     Whenever I feel really depressed about the stinkingness of politics, I take a dive into Fleet Street and see what stinkingness really is.

   • 2014 September 8, Michael White, “Roll up, roll up! The Amazing Salmond will show a Scotland you won't believe”, in The Guardian:

     We will know soon enough whether Cameron's was a masterly piece of nerve keeping, or the fatal blunder that broke the union of 1707. In 2012, Salmond gave some listeners the impression that devo max is what he really wanted. Whatever the outcome, Fleet Street's introspective pundits will say: "I told you so", and make dire predictions for the future, which are likely to be off the mark.

   • 2023 September 23, Lauren Indvik, “God is in the details”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 3:

     It was there—after she fired most of the staff—that Fleet Street began to paint [Anna Wintour] as an ice queen.