The last page in the 300-year story of Fleet Street as the home of the British press is being written as it emerges that the Fourth Estate's one remaining resident in the "Street of Shame" may shortly move on.
Senior executives at Reuters, the leading international news agency, are looking at alternatives to the company's imposing corporate headquarters on the famous central London thoroughfare.
The departure of the global news and financial data specialist would mark a final settlement in the 15-year divorce between the street and the newspaper industry that borrowed its name.
Starting with the departure in 1986 of the Sun and the News of the World to Wapping, reluctantly followed by the Times, national newspapers moved en masse from Fleet Street, leaving room for a new breed of tenant from the City.
Reuters, the company, which is worth about £19 billion ($65 billion) and employs more than 18,000 staff worldwide, is thought to be interested in bringing its London operations under one roof.
Its headquarters at 85 Fleet Street, designed by early-20th-century architect Edwin Lutyens, houses senior managers and administrative staff, with journalists and other workers in nearby central London offices. Property experts said the news agency had already looked at buildings in central London and Docklands, including the former base of the Mirror newspapers in Holborn.
The likelihood of a move - which would remove the final vestige of Fleet Street's media presence since Britain's first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, opened there in 1702 - could be increased by the arrival in July of its new chief executive. Tom Glocer, an American former corporate lawyer, has already played a part in organising the move of the company's American headquarters to a landmark site in New York's Times Square.
The move coincides with suggestions that the 150-year-old information giant, which once sent its news via carrier pigeon, is trying to improve its performance.
But for tourists at least, the historical tie between the thoroughfare and journalists will remain. One guide bitingly remarks that the ancient river Fleet, which gave the street its name, is now "rather appropriately a covered sewer."
- INDEPENDENT
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