Reuters & Press Association building

82-85 Fleet Street, EC4
Built: 1934-1938
Architect: Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens
Listing: Grade II (1972)

Next to St Bride’s Church and across the street from the iconic Daily Express Building, the former headquarters of Reuters and the Press Association is another reminder of the centrality of Fleet Street to the history of journalism.  Curiously, this site was previously occupied by the offices of the satirical periodical Punch.

The plan of the Reuters building has a comparatively narrow frontage along Fleet Street and a longer, deeper return down Salisbury Court.  Within a decade of its construction, such Portland stone palaces would be considered probably too expensive and certainly reactionary in taste, but this listed building has survived the test of time and the judgement of posterity unscathed.  Working to an evidently ambitious and formal brief, here Lutyens, by then among the most prominent architects in Britain, stuck to a tried-and-true approach that is visible in other inter-war creations of his.  Overall, however, the classicism is a bit more stylised than, say, Midlands Bank or Britannic House (q.v.).

The organisation of the elevations is tripartite. An astylar Doric, rusticated base encompasses the  ground floor and attic storey. The four successive storeys have flush ashlar and very low-relief pilasters. Above those, we find two further recessed storeys, then a rather extended attic with a concave façade and pedimented lateral gables.  There is a slightly Mannerist flavour to the whole.

The most dominant element, besides the animated roof-line articulation, is the central arrangement surrounding the main entrance.  This features a markedly recessed doorway flanked by boldly-executed terms. This is encased in an equally pronounced arch, beneath witch a large oculus window serves as background to a bronze sculpture of Fame.  The “PA-R” initials of the commissioning companies are visible in an escutcheon above the entrance arch as well as the spandrels near the top. Note how the voussoirs push boldly into the ashlar of the third storey.

Reuters (now Thompson Reuters, located in Canary Wharf) remains one of the main news agencies globally.  Founded in 1851 in London by Paul Julius Reuters, it pioneered rapid transmission of financial prices and relevant news by carrier pigeons and, soon thereafter, telegraph.  Reuters ‘broke’ many historic events to the wider world, including the assassination of President Lincoln (1865) and the erection of the Berlin Wall (1961). The Press Association was a collaborative effort between regional newspaper publishers, aimed at using the telegraph to distribute news more reliably than had bene accomplished previously. Operating since 1870, between the 1920s and 1990s, it was intricately connected via shareholdings to Reuters and that explains the co-commissioning of these impressive offices.