DICTIONARIES still list it as a synonym for the newspaper industry, but in truth there is only one national title left in Fleet Street, and it’s The Beano.

In this ungodly parish of journalism, about which even the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his reservations last night, the last rites were performed yesterday in St Bride’s, the mother church of Grub Street hacks, for a deserted village to mark the emigration of its last substantial resident to the Elysian fields of the London Docklands.

Reuters, the international news agency founded by Julius Reuter and a flock of pigeons in 1850 to fly stock market prices from Aachen to Brussels, is departing its ancestral acres at 85 Fleet Street, an iconic address and fine Lutyens building that it has occupied since 1939, for the brave new world of Canary Wharf.

Holding a church service to celebrate the coming of the removal men may be unusual, but St Bride’s is determined to remain the spiritual home of what was once a village but is now a diaspora with colonies scattered as far as Docklands, Wapping and Kensington.

Fleet Street has been the inky epicentre of Britain since William Caxton’s successors moved his pioneering printing press from Westminster to the churchyard of St Bride’s in the early years of the 16th century; the resident colony of literate clerics promised the best market for a struggling printer.

In its journalistic heyday you could not walk the length of the street without meeting someone who owed you a tenner. If you spotted the approach of one to whom you owed a similar sum, there were more than enough pubs to hide in. Former temples of journalism are now occupied by the minions of commerce behind their grandiose preserved frontages.

The pubs in this boulevard of banking, now a mere westward extension of the City, offer inflated wine lists where once they served honest ale to lubricate and ease the scribbler’s toil. One pub even had a division bell, rung to summon wayward journalists back to their newsrooms.

Reuters carries much of the responsibility for scattering the Fleet Street community. When the news agency was floated with huge success as a public company in 1984, the newspaper publishers, its former owners, made enough money to allow them to move, expand and tackle a century’s worth of restrictive practices.

That, at least, is the official line. The suspicion lingers among the muttering soldiery of the trade that proprietors wanted to dissipate a close-knit village in which supposed deadly rivals exchanged exclusive stories over a drink or three.

During yesterday afternoon’s service Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of the News Corporation, parent company of The Times, read the familiar passage from Ecclesiasticus: “Let us now praise famous men,” which extols learning and wisdom but also speaks of “rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations”.

Neither riches nor peace are the promised rewards of the humble newspaper man.

Tom Glocer, the current chief executive of Reuters, told a packed congregation that Fleet Street had represented both the best and worst of British journalism. By moving to Canary Wharf to join such national titles as The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and The Independent, his company will save £5 million a year by bringing staff in offices across London under one roof.

Alexander Chancellor, newspaper columnist and son of a Reuters’ former chief executive, said it was only right and proper that the distinguished agency, like the captain of a ship, should be the last to leave the historic home of the industry.

Canon David Meara, Rector of St Bride’s, said that the relationship between his church and journalism was like no other among the professions and industries of the capital. His parishioners may be scattered but they remain a flock more in need of spiritual guidance than most. Telling the truth, as Dr Geoffrey Fisher, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, said at the centenary of Reuters, was a spiritual virtue.

DC Thomson, the Dundee-based publishers of The Beano, has no plans to evacuate its office, home to 15 journalists and a picture editor, at 185 Fleet Street, where it has been for the past hundred years.

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