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Tube: Temple (Mon-Sat only) or Blackfriars. In 1500 a certain Wynkyn de Worde, a pupil of William Caxton, moved the Caxton presses from Westminster to Fleet Street , to be close to the lawyers of the Inns of Court and to the clergy of St Paul's. However, the street really boomed two hundred years later, when in 1702, the now defunct Daily Courant, Britain's first daily newspaper, was published from here. By the nineteenth century, all the major national and provincial dailies had their offices and printing presses in the Fleet Street district, a situation that prevailed until the 1980s, when the press barons relocated their operations elsewhere. The best source of information about the old-style Fleet Street is the so-called "journalists' and printers' cathedral", the church of St Bride's (Mon-Sat 9am-5pm), which boasts Wren's tallest and most exquisite spire (said to be the inspiration for the tiered wedding cake). The crypt contains a little museum of Fleet Street history, with information on the Daily Courant and the Universal Daily Register, which later became The Times, claiming to be "the faithful recorder of every species of intelligence ? circulated for a particular set of readers only". The western section of Fleet Street was spared the Great Fire, which stopped just short of Prince Henry's Room (Mon-Sat 11am-2pm; free), a fine Jacobean house with timber-framed bay windows. The first-floor room now contains material relating to the diarist Samuel Pepys , who was born nearby in Salisbury Court in 1633 and baptized in St Bride's. Even if you've no interest in Pepys, the wooden-panelled room is worth a look - it contains one of the finest Jacobean plasterwork ceilings in London, and a lot of original stained glass. Numerous narrow alleyways lead off the north side of Fleet Street, two of which - Bolt Court and Hind Court - eventually open out into Gough Square, on which stands Dr Johnson's House ( www.drjh.dircon.co.uk; May-Sept Mon-Sat 11am-5.30pm; Oct-April Mon-Sat 11am-5pm; GBP3). The great savant, writer and lexicographer lived here from 1747 to 1759, whilst compiling the 41,000 entries for the first dictionary of the English language, two first editions of which can be seen in the grey-panelled rooms of the house. You can also view the open-plan attic, in which Johnson and his six helpers put together the dictionary.
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