Fleet Street gives Sweeney Todd his title in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Fleet Street is a real thoroughfare in central London, historically associated with the British newspaper industry. In the musical and its film adaptation, it becomes the home of Todd’s barber shop and the setting for much of the revenge story.
The character returns to London under the name Sweeney Todd after being falsely imprisoned and separated from his family. He opens a barber shop above Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, beginning a murderous scheme directed at the judge who wronged him.
The 2007 film adapts Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical, which itself draws on earlier penny-dreadful versions of the Sweeney Todd legend. Fleet Street is therefore both a geographic reference and a shorthand for the story’s grim Victorian-London atmosphere.