Fleet Street

Last Thursday one of my journalist friends invited me on a guided tour of the pubs of Fleet Street. Her boss, the editor of a popular weekly magazine, was taking a group from pub to pub, telling stories of journalistic feats from days gone by. Fleet Street, if you don't know, was home to many British newspapers until very recently.
We stopped at one pub in the shadow of St. Bride's church, the location of the first printing press in Britain back in 1500. It's known as the journalists' church, and interestingly enough, is also the church where the parents of America's first European-born child were wed, in 1587.
Some of our discussion centered around the fact that Fleet Street grew up where it did (just outside the western gates of the old city of London) because of the concentration of religious establishments in that location. When mass printing first came to England, the main users of the printing press were monks, printing material for priests and other religious scholars. Over the years, newspapers sprang up around the same location, making use of the monks' technology and the proximity of the king's revenue service, which had to stamp each piece of printed material.