For three centuries London was where the English-speaking world's printed matter was made. The newspapers came off Fleet Street, the books came out of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, the dictionaries and almanacks and encyclopaedias that organised the language were compiled in suburban back rooms, and the private presses of Hammersmith and Chiswick set type by hand in protest against all of it. The city's blue plaques mark the people who did it: the first London daily paper, the printers who put Dickens into the world in monthly parts, the schoolmaster who edited the Oxford English Dictionary from a shed, and a bookbinder who threw an entire typeface off Hammersmith Bridge rather than let anyone else use it.
This is a guide to the blue plaques of London's printers, publishers, editors and booksellers, part of the wider blue plaque scheme that records the city's history house by house.
Fleet Street and the First Newspapers
At 12 Ludgate Circus, a plaque records that in a house near the site, in 1702, The Daily Courant was published: the first London daily newspaper. It was a single sheet printed on one side, largely translated foreign reports, with an editor who announced that he would supply the facts and let readers make their own reflections, "having no room for any". Everything Fleet Street became over the next 280 years starts there.
At 76 Fleet Street, a plaque marks the site of Bradbury and Evans, printer and publisher, who operated from 1847 to 1900 and printed Dickens and Thackeray. They also owned Punch, and their falling-out with Dickens over his refusal to let them stay neutral about his marriage is one of the great publishing quarrels of the century. Dickens's own London is covered in our guide to Charles Dickens's London.
Punch itself has a plaque at Church Farmhouse Museum in Hendon, where Mark Lemon lived, the co-founder and first editor of the magazine that invented the modern political cartoon and, in the process, gave the word "cartoon" its current meaning.
The press barons are represented by the most consequential of them. At 31 Pandora Road in West Hampstead, a plaque records Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe (1865-1922), journalist and newspaper proprietor, who founded the Daily Mail in 1896, later took over The Times, and effectively invented the mass-circulation popular newspaper in Britain. Whatever you make of the result, the modern press is largely his design.
And at 72 Cadogan Square, a plaque marks Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), war correspondent and writer, who reported from the Spanish Civil War, D-Day (having stowed away on a hospital ship after being refused accreditation), Dachau, Vietnam, and half a dozen other conflicts across sixty years.
The Dictionary in a Garden Shed
At Highwood House, Highwood Hill in Mill Hill, a plaque records Sir James Murray (1837-1915), schoolmaster, philologist, and editor of the New English Dictionary, the project that became the Oxford English Dictionary.
Murray is one of the great obsessive achievements in the history of publishing. A largely self-taught Scot who left school at fourteen, he took on a dictionary that its backers estimated would take ten years, worked on it for thirty-six, and died with the letters T to Z still unfinished. He built a corrugated-iron structure in his garden, the Scriptorium, lined with more than a thousand pigeonholes, and processed the slips of paper sent in by thousands of volunteer readers who had been asked to record how words were actually used. The dictionary that resulted defined the language by evidence rather than by authority, and it was assembled in a shed in north London.
Reference publishing has a second plaque. At White Lodge, 68 Silver Street in Enfield, one records Joseph Whitaker (1820-1895), publisher and founder of Whitaker's Almanack, the annual compendium of facts about the world that has been published continuously since 1868.
Publishers and Booksellers
At 12 Hyde Park Street, a plaque records W. H. Smith (1825-1891), bookseller and statesman, who built his father's newsagency into a national chain by taking the then-novel step of opening bookstalls at railway stations, correctly guessing that a captive traveller with an hour to spare is the ideal customer for a cheap novel. He was also First Lord of the Admiralty, which Gilbert and Sullivan mocked mercilessly in HMS Pinafore.
At 13 Handen Road in Lewisham, a plaque marks the birthplace of Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), the publisher whose firm later became Allen and Unwin, and who published, among a great deal else, The Lord of the Rings, reportedly on the recommendation of his young son, who had been paid a shilling to read the manuscript of The Hobbit.
At 51 Netherhall Gardens in Hampstead, a plaque records John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911), journalist, editor, and builder of free public libraries, who came from a Cornish working family, made money in publishing, and spent it founding more than seventy libraries, hospitals and institutions, largely in places that had none.
At 233 New Cross Road, a plaque marks John Tallis (1816-1876), publisher of London Street Views, the extraordinary series of illustrated street directories that drew the elevations of every building on London's main thoroughfares, shop by shop. They are now among the most useful surviving records of what the Victorian city actually looked like at pavement level.
Two plaques mark booksellers. At 8 Russell Street in Covent Garden, a plaque records the house occupied by the bookseller Thomas Davies, where in 1763 Dr Samuel Johnson first met James Boswell, a meeting in the back parlour of a bookshop that produced the most famous biography in the language. At 39A Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, a plaque marks Frederick Metcalf, bookseller, who traded there in 1841, which is a pleasingly modest thing to be remembered for.
At the William Morris Gallery on Forest Road, a plaque records that the publisher Edward Lloyd lived in the house from 1857 to 1885. Lloyd made his fortune from penny bloods and Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, one of the first papers to sell in the hundreds of thousands, and he is a useful reminder that mass publishing in Britain was built on cheap sensational fiction long before it was built on news.
The Private Presses, and the Type in the Thames
By the end of the nineteenth century a reaction had set in against industrial printing, and it produced the finest books made in Britain since the sixteenth century.
At 15 Upper Mall in Hammersmith, a plaque records Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922), who founded the Doves Bindery and the Doves Press in the house. The Doves Press produced work of extreme austerity and beauty, most famously its five-volume Bible, set entirely in a single typeface designed for it, the Doves Type, and using almost no decoration at all.
What happened next is the best story in this collection. Cobden-Sanderson fell out irreparably with his partner Emery Walker over who owned the type. Rather than let it pass to Walker or to anyone else, he began, in secret, carrying it down to Hammersmith Bridge at night and dropping it into the Thames, a few packages at a time, over a period running from 1916 into 1917, until the entire fount, tens of thousands of pieces of metal, was on the riverbed. He recorded the disposal in his journals as a bequest to the river. In 2014 a search of the foreshore recovered some of the type, and the face has since been digitally revived, which means the Doves Type is again in use a century after its maker drowned it.
A few streets away, at 27 Stamford Brook Road in Chiswick, a plaque marks Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), painter, printer and wood engraver, son of the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who ran the Eragny Press and cut his own illustrations. He also appears among the artists' blue plaques of London.
Hogarth House, Richmond
At Hogarth House, 34 Paradise Road in Richmond, a plaque records that Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived there from 1915 to 1924 and founded the Hogarth Press in the house in 1917.
It began as a therapeutic hobby: a small hand press bought partly in the hope that manual work would help Virginia's health. It became one of the most important publishing houses of the century, issuing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the first English translations of Freud, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf's own novels, which she could therefore write without any editor's permission. It is a rare case of a writer solving the publishing problem by simply becoming the publisher, and it happened in a suburban house in Richmond. The wider circle is covered in our guide to the Bloomsbury Group.
Two more plaques mark the printed word in the service of a cause. At 61 Judd Street, a plaque records Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who operated the Free Russian Press from the building in 1854 to 1856, printing in London the uncensored Russian material that could not be published at home and smuggling it back into the empire. And at Lower Richmond Road in Putney, a plaque marks J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967), writer and literary editor, who ran the books pages of the BBC's The Listener for more than twenty years and published early work by a generation of poets.
Why the Trade Clustered Here
The geography is unusually tidy. Printing settled around St Paul's and Fleet Street in the sixteenth century because that was where the church, the courts, and the lawyers were, meaning both the customers and the literate workforce, and once the trade was there the newspapers followed the printers rather than the other way round. Publishing proper drifted west into Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, near the booksellers, the coffee houses, and the writers, which is why so many of these plaques sit within a mile of the British Museum, alongside the others in our guide to Bloomsbury's blue plaques.
The private presses did the opposite deliberately. Cobden-Sanderson at Hammersmith, Pissarro at Chiswick, the Woolfs at Richmond: the reaction against industrial printing set up as far from Fleet Street as it reasonably could, out along the river, where the work could be slow.
A Printing London Walk
Fleet Street and Ludgate is the obvious start, with the Daily Courant plaque at Ludgate Circus and Bradbury and Evans a short walk along, in the street where the trade lived until the 1980s. Bloomsbury and Covent Garden add Herzen on Judd Street, Metcalf on Marchmont Street, and the Davies bookshop on Russell Street where Johnson met Boswell.
The best trip, though, is west along the river: Cobden-Sanderson at Upper Mall in Hammersmith, where you can stand on the bridge he dropped the type from, then Pissarro at Chiswick, then out to the Woolfs at Richmond. If you want to find these plaques as you walk, and keep a record of the ones you have visited, Legacy maps every blue plaque in London, turning a day of exploring into a collection you build over time. These are the plaques of the people who made everything else legible, which is a fair claim for the least visible trade in the city.