A Farewell to Fleet Street
Abstract
Exhibition at the Museum of London VIRGINIA BERRIDGE As a young research student, embarked on a study of the nineteenth-century popular Sunday press, I visited the offices of the recently closed Sunday Citizen at the seedier King's Cross end of Grays Inn Road. The librarian of the former Reynolds' News maintained a tenuous existence, alone in a vast, empty building. From presses to office layout down to office furniture, wooden roll top desks, swivel chairs and all, nothing would have been out of place in a production of The Front Page. There was an air of the inter-war decades rather than of the late 1960s. The exhibition, A Farewell to Fleet Street at the Museum of London, demonstrates that the Sunday Citizen's production and administration was by no means untypical. The Harris intertype monarch machine (No. 37766), donated by the Guardian, which fronts it, was the last hot metal slug composing machine ever made (in 1976). Accompanied by its cabinet of drawers for matrices and a battered bogie for transporting reels of newsprint to the presses, it has a distinctly dated air. But the bulk of the exhibition is composed not of artefacts but of words and pictures. Newspapers