London’s Fleet Street is a fascinating road, with alleys and courts running off it and behind it; it is an old thoroughfare that has long been home to a wide range of residents, including manual workers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, lawyers. Fleet Street was the focus of ‘rough doings’ back in the Middle Ages, with violence and murder taking place there. Yet even at this time, it was also already a busy shopping centre, with Walter Thornbury, in Old and New London (1878), referring to a bootmaker on the street who had once provided Edward II with six pairs of boots with silk tassels.

The road, which runs from the end of the Strand to St Paul’s in the City of London, has, however, been synonymous with the printing and newspaper industry for many years. Today, it is forging a new identity, but it’s easy to forget that its history has always been about more than newspapers. Back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the road and its offshoots were home to a wide variety of industries and residents who all called it home. There are a range of archival sources – most obviously censuses and newspaper adverts, but also, for earlier years particularly, polling records, land tax records and apprenticeship records – that help build a picture of a vibrant London community, before the newspapers moved in.

A particular industry that was well represented in Fleet Street’s history, for example, was the jewellery trade. During the reign of Henry IV, there were goldsmiths resident there, with one being murdered as he ventured out along the nearby Strand, and his body thrown under the Temple Stairs leading down into the river Thames. In the 18th century, one of the street’s best-known residents (outside, of course, of Dr Samuel Johnson, a former resident of Gough Square, off Fleet Street) was Thomas Harper. Harper’s origins are unknown, but what is known is that he spent several years living in Charleston, South Carolina, before his loyalty to the British throne during a time of revolution led to him moving to the Caribbean before returning to England. Once back, with his wife and older children, he opened a jeweller’s shop at 207 Fleet Street. Being both a master jeweller and a Freemason, Thomas created some impressive Freemasonry regalia in his time.

At the Strand end of Fleet Street, there had originally stood a bank, Child’s & Co, dominating this part of the road since the 17th century. For some time, its next door neighbour was the Devil’s Tavern, once an infamous and debauched place, but later a popular inn with local lawyers and doctors. Child’s & Co bought the tavern in 1788, and replaced it with a court of houses – Child’s Place. At the top of Child’s Place in the 1790s was another jeweller’s shop, run by another Harper – John Harper. The son of a local brass founder, and born and raised in Gough Square, John had originally been apprenticed to his father before setting up a business at 3 Child’s Place with jeweller John Mainwaring. After Mainwaring got married in 1799, the two men appear to have stopped working together. Harper got married at St Dunstan in the West in 1803 and moved out to Clerkenwell, whereas Mainwaring set up business with members of his wife’s family in the Lincoln’s Inn Fields area.

Although during the 17th and early 18th centuries, Fleet Street looked like it was developing into a place where people could go to be entertained – with freak shows, animal shows and fire-eaters being recorded as performing there, and gambling also prevalent – it soon settled back down into being a centre for shopping and industry. Building a snapshot of life along Fleet Street in 1795, using a Post Office directory, some of the businesses there would seem out of place in today’s modern city. There were linen drapers, tinmen, perfumers, oil and colourmen (selling paints), hat makers and musical clockmakers, men’s mercers (dealers in fabrics such as silks and velvets), upholsterers, cabinet makers, grocers, sword cutlers and auctioneers. Alongside these businesses were many lawyers who both lived and worked in the area.

Fleet Street’s shops originally comprised of gabled houses, with signs swinging outside to denote what each shop was selling. These signs could be dangerous in the wind, and in the mid-18th century it was ordered that signboards had to be flat against the shop fronts, rather than swinging into the street. This coincided with the building of pavements on the road – previously, the road itself was only rough paved, with gutters on either side – full of mud and waste that threatened the cleanliness of walkers’ clothing. Although the changes lost a bit of the road’s character, they also (pardon the pun) paved the way towards a more modern city street.

In the early 19th century, a study of city directories shows how increased consumerism, and scientific and industrial advancements, were having an impact on the type of businesses being operated in the area. George Colk is listed in an 1820s Post Office directory as a chemist and druggist based at 29 Fleet Street; meanwhile, at number 69, James Chaffin was running a glass and lamp warehouse. The directories show the sheer breadth of industry in the area, but also some family business that would continue for decades – for example, at number 108 in 1829 was Thomas Williamson, a hosier and glover. He died at 108 in 1848, with his wife, Ann, and son, Thomas, continuing to run the business until Ann died in 1858. Thomas Junior was still a hosier at 108 Fleet Street in 1861. Another Williamson, John, was based at 175 Fleet Street in the 1820s, from where he made artificial legs and eyes. There was also a family fur business – in Hind Court, off Fleet Street, 39-year-old Henry Frederick Ehn worked as a furrier at No. 2; one of his brothers manufactured furs in the adjoining Gough Square – a trade learned from their father George, a wholesale fur manufacturer. The Ehns’ extensive fur business ran from various city locations, employing both men and women.

Some of these local businesses saw sons apprenticed to their fathers, or otherwise learned on the job from them, before setting up their own businesses in the same trade locally. Others remained in the street, only doors along from their parent, but working in a different field. James Harper, one of jeweller Thomas’s children, was apprenticed to a stationer, and in the 1810s worked as a printer and bookseller at 46 Fleet Street. James was in the right place to do his job. Despite its variety of businesses, Fleet Street was also something of a centre for stationers and booksellers. The latter might have been because of drift from the traditional bookselling area around St Paul’s Churchyard, which was at the top end of Fleet Street. In 1795, Jeremiah-Samuel Jordan ran a bookshop at 166 Fleet Street, but this was a business that could be run by either men or women – or sometimes both. Catherine Kearsley, for example, ran a bookshop at number 46 with her husband George, being named as his equal in the city directories of the late 18th century. Some booksellers specialised in particular areas – such as Richard Pheney, at number 17, who sold law books. This was not surprising given that there were inns of court nearby, but his was not an untroubled career – he would become bankrupt in the 1830s.

In addition, joining the booksellers and printers of Fleet Street, of course, were the newspapers. Although we might think of its reputation as a home to newspapers as a 19th century or early 20th century phenomenon, in fact, it was home to the first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, in 1702. An 1829 directory shows that of the country’s many publications, the John Bull was at 40 Fleet Street, Bell’s Messenger at number 63, both the Sunday Times and the Kent & Essex Mercury at 72, the Dispatch at 139, the British Farmer’s Chronicle at 165, and Cobbett’s Register  at 183.

This isn’t to say that Fleet Street was dominated by newspapers, however – this would occur more in the latter half of the century, after the repeal of paper and newspaper taxes. Even at the time of the 1841 census, there was still a diverse collection of trades represented on the street itself and in its courts and alleys. There were cheesemongers, opticians, painters, music sellers and perfumers living and working alongside those who listed their occupations more generally as warehouse or shopmen. There were also those who provided food and drink to others locally: publicans and coffee house keepers such as Joseph Pursey, who lived at 88 Crown Court with his family. Generally, the street was inhabited by those with useful trades, and shops, although a glimpse of a harder life was evidenced by elderly needlemakers and invalids. Continuity was provided by the many booksellers and printers still living in the area, with Sugar Loaf Court being home to printers living next door to bootmakers and engineers. It’s perhaps no surprise, given this multiplicity of individuals, all working hard to make a living, that in the mid 1840s, the London offices of the Anti-Corn Law League were based here, at 67 Fleet Street – the League saw the Corn Laws as stopping progress and damaging economic wellbeing and freedom.

Although Fleet Street has long been home to printers and sellers of printed books and music, and it remains synonymous with the newspaper industry, historically it has been much more than this. The sheer breadth of industries represented in its residents shows that it has always been a vital, busy thoroughfare where almost anything could be bought and sold; where one jeweller, who had spent part of his life in America, made regalia for Freemasons, and another sold furs using experience learned from his father. It’s where fortunes could be made, but also where others could be made bankrupt. In short, it was a microcosm of life in the metropolis.