Janet Street-Porter

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Janet Street-Porter bigraphy, stories - British media personality, journalist, television presenter, editor

Janet Street-Porter : biography

27 December 1946 –

Janet Street-Porter (born Janet Vera Ardern on 27 December 1946) is a British media personality, journalist and broadcaster. She was editor for two years of The Independent on Sunday. She relinquished the job to become editor-at-large in 2002. – deadline.itv.com. Retrieved 23 April 2007. Her distinctive London accent and her teeth have been the butt of many comic routines.

Other activities

Street-Porter was president of the Ramblers’ Association for two years from 1994. She walked across Britain from Dungeness in Kent to Conway in Wales for the series Coast to Coast in 1998. She also walked from Edinburgh to London in a straight line in 1998, for a television series and her book, As the Crow Flies.As the Crow Flies, Metro Books, London (1998) ISBN 978-1-900512-71-8

The Clerkenwell house commissioned by Janet Street-Porter In 1994, for the documentary series The Longest Walk, she visited long-distance walker Ffyona Campbell on the last section of her round-the-world walk. 

In 1987, Street-Porter commissioned a house from CZWG Architects. The building, its exterior a postmodernist mini-echo, conscious or not, of Broadcasting House, stands out among Clerkenwell’s mainly Georgian houses.

In 1966, Street-Porter appeared as an extra in the nightclub scene in Blowup. In 2003, she wrote and presented a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Festival titled All the Rage. She published the autobiographical Baggage in 2004, about her childhood in working class London. Its sequel is titled Fallout. Life’s Too F***ing Short is a volume which presents, as she puts it, her answer to "getting what you want out of life by the most direct route."

Early life

Janet Street-Porter was born Janet Vera Ardern in Brentford, Middlesex, a daughter of Stanley W G Bull, an electrician and Cherry Cuff Ardern (née Jones) a WelshLoose Women, 22 March 2012 school dinner lady. Her mother was still married to her first husband, George Ardern, at the time, and was not to marry Stanley until 1954, hence her name being recorded thus in the birth records. She was later to take her father’s surname.

She grew up in Fulham and Perivale, West London. Her family, she says, were poor. She went to Lady Margaret School in Parsons Green from 1958 to 1964 and then spent two years at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, photographer Tim Street-Porter. – screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved 27 April 2007.

Early career

She dropped out of college and found media work. After a brief stint at a girls’ magazine called Petticoat, she joined the Daily Mail in 1969, where she became the deputy fashion editor. – dailymail.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2007. She became fashion editor of the Evening Standard in 1971.

In early 1975, Street-Porter was launch editor of Sell Out, an off-shoot of the London listings magazine, Time Out, alongside its publisher and her second husband, Tony Elliott. The magazine was not a success.

Newspaper work

Street-Porter became editor of the Independent on Sunday in 1999. Despite derision from her critics, she took the paper’s circulation up to 270,460, an increase of 11.6 per cent. In 2002 she became editor-at-large, writing a regular column.

She has written for numerous newspapers and magazines.

Controversy

Following the death of Ian Tomlinson, Street-Porter dedicated her editor-at-large column in the Independent on Sunday to painting a picture of Tomlinson as a "troubled man with quite a few problems":"Knowing that he was an alcoholic is critical to understanding his sense of disorientation and his attitude towards the police, which might on first viewing of the video footage, seem a bit stroppy."]

12 April 2009]