Introduction

The financial press in Britain has a history almost as long as the history of British newspapers themselves. Lloyds List began regular publication in 1734, reporting shipping news of interest to the marine insurance industry (Cameron and Farndon 1985; Griffiths 2006). By the 1820s most London daily newspapers had a ‘City page’, which reported on the newly emerging stock market in an era of rapid industrialisation (Taylor 2015). By 1900, as London emerged as the nexus of global finance, its financial press was the largest and most sophisticated in the world. The fate of the UK financial press was closely tied to the state of the economy, and especially the changing role of the City of London. The decline of the City in the interwar years was reflected in its diminished role, but by the 1960s the re-emergence of London as a global financial centre transformed the financial pages. They grew larger and more specialised, while their influence extended from a narrow audience of City traders to the wider public– and to a global audience. Prestigious new roles emerged: the labour correspondent, the personal finance reporter, and the economic correspondent. In addition, the financial press played an increasingly critical role in framing public understanding of the major financial crises that shook the British economy over the century.

The Evolution of the City Pages

On 1 January 1900, readers of the City page of the Morning Post could reflect on the past year with satisfaction. Interest rates were down and global investments were holding up. Readers could check the value of their investments daily. Most of the page was devoted to listing prices across an astounding range of global markets, from the price of onions at Covent Garden, to the interest rates on Argentinian bonds, the price of mining shares in the USA, and the latest developments on the French Bourse, and currency rates– all made possible by the spread of the global telegraph network in the late nineteenth century that gave access to financial information around the world (Read 1992; Winseck and Pike 2007).