A walk down Grub Street: uncovering Barbican’s publishing past

I knew very little about Barbican before graduation. We would pass the station on the tube almost every other day, but never got off to explore. For three whole years, it remained a quaint, little mystery.

Until one day - we were told our graduation ceremony would be held at the Barbican Centre, a venue so popular that it was practically synonymous with the area itself.

On my first day there, I hadn’t noticed much about the Centre, except for its striking brutalist architecture. Unlike other buildings along Silk Street that dated back to the 1700s, it seemed recent and contemporary - and at the same time, hinted at an intriguing past that none of us knew of.

Little did I think that this history would draw surprising parallels to my own little world. Not much later that day, we found out that the Barbican Centre was built in the area that was home to the beginnings of the city’s journalism industry - and was in fact, the birthplace of the first daily newspaper in London.

When I first heard this, despite it being during our commencement speech, I gasped out loud in staggering disbelief. As a journalist myself, the coincidence seemed uncanny. So much so, that to me, it felt it just couldn't be. I was desperate to find out more, and upon my return from the graduation, decided to take a half-day out to truly understand what were the exciting origins of the city's publishing industry.

Down a rabbit hole I went, learning that Barbican was built atop a district once known as Cripplegate, which had vanished from the city after WWII bombings. Later, I came across a fascinating article on The Guardian, where Cripplegate was said to have been “inextricably linked, thanks to Jonathan Swift, with the feuding hack writers of Grub Street and saw the production of the city’s first daily newspaper.”

In the 1600s, Grub Street rose to fame for its hack journalism and sensational writers. It housed communities of booksellers, printers and publishers who, over the century, made their way from low-level tabloids to popular weekly newspapers and literary journals. Towards the end of the 1800s, the street had begun to fade from the city’s journalistic scene, instead giving rise to London’s more recently popular hub for publishing - Fleet Street.

As a true correspondent might wonder, I was still curious to know how Grub Street is credited with the birth of the first daily paper. Reaching out to the author of the Guardian article to find out more, I eventually came across Tom Bolton’s book, Vanished City - and finally learnt that the city’s first newspaper, The Daily Courant, was produced by Elizabeth Mallet who lived on Grub Street [1].

Finally, slumping back in my chair as I took this all in, I couldn't help but smile at the coincidence. The strange, cosmic coincidence, that had led to me graduating in the heart of the historic journalism industry of the city, just as I was setting my first step into a budding technology journalism career. 

Reflecting on this now, the publishing industry has come a long way and persevered through so many centuries. Once just a sector for aspiring authors and brewery-turned-publishing houses, it is now the big and powerful world of media, dominated by global brands and content powerhouses, broadcasting stations and niche magazines, award-winning journalists and award-winning journalism alike - and though just a little star in this vast universe, I am proud to be a part of this legacy, and hope to play a meaningful role in shaping the future of the industry.

[1] How the Humble Coffee House Birthed Modern Media and Society (Medium.com)

Yukta studied BSc Data Science and Business Analytics and lives in Malaysia.