Agency shuts Fleet Street office

Reuters is the last major news agency to leave Fleet Street

A church service will take place on Wednesday to mark the departure of one of the last news organisations from Fleet Street.

The Reuters news agency is moving to new premises in Canary Wharf, east London, after 66 years.

The service will be held at the 'journalists' church" of St Bride's. News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, who began the exodus when he moved The Sun and the News of the World to Wapping in 1986, will give a reading.

Fleet Street began its association with publishing in 1500 when Wynkyn de Worde built London's first printing press next to St Bride's.

What used to happen is reporters and journalists from the Daily Express, the Mail and the Mirror would go into the same pubs and the would exchange their stories name here

It became home to Britain's newspaper industry.

But one by one the newspapers moved out - the former offices of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express are now home to the US investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Jeffrey Goodman, a former assistant editor of the Mirror, told BBC News the loss of the Fleet Street community had changed the face of newspaper journalism.

He said: "What used to happen is reporters and journalists from the Daily Express, the Mail and the Mirror would go into the same pubs and the would exchange their stories.

Community spirit

"They would gossip about them and that sort of cross fertilisation of thought helped to create a real force, equality and style of journalism that quite frankly is missing today.

"Journalists were outside the office most of the time. When they finished their stories they would telephone it in.

"You can almost feel today when you read anything in newspapers it lacks that input which you only get when you have a kind of community spirit that existed in the old Fleet Street."

The only British journalists left in Fleet Street are a handful who work for Scottish publisher DC Thomson.

French news agency AFP also remains there.