Wapping is a district in East London, on the north bank of the Thames, in the old Docklands area. For centuries it was a rough sailors' and dockers' neighbourhood; today it is mostly expensive flats in converted warehouses.

The reason the name appears in a dictionary is what happened there in 1986. Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers — The Times, The Sun and others — out of Fleet Street, which had been the home of British newspapers for two hundred years, into a new computerised printing plant at Wapping. The new machines meant thousands of printing workers were no longer needed, and about five thousand of them were sacked. There followed a year of very bitter picketing and clashes with police outside the gates.

So when British people say 'Wapping', they often are not talking about a place at all. They mean that fight, and everything it stood for: new technology against old jobs, and the end of Fleet Street. 'Since Wapping, the industry has never been the same.' It works rather like 'Fleet Street' itself — a street name standing for a whole world. You will meet it in journalism, history and politics reading.

It is pronounced WOP-ing.