From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Harrow Observer

Weekly tabloid newspaper reporting on the London Borough of Harrow

Summary

Weekly tabloid newspaper reporting on the London Borough of Harrow

Field	Value
name	Harrow Observer
type	Weekly newspaper
owner
founder
founded
language	English
launched
ceased_publication
headquarters	Uxbridge, England (2009–2014)
publishing_country	North West London, England, United Kingdom
circulation	9,017
circulation_date
website

The Harrow Observer was a paid-for local weekly tabloid newspaper covering stories from the London Borough of Harrow. It had separate editions for Pinner, Harrow, Stanmore and Wembley & Willesden. The former newspaper titles were retained by its owners, Reach plc, as branding for the Harrow, Pinner and Wembley sections of their getwestlondon news website, which is now MyLondon.

History

The Harrow Observer has documented a variety of events over the years, from rail crashes to royal visits, court cases to council estates. It began life as the four-page, two pence The Harrow Monthly Gazette and General Advertiser. The paper first hit newsstands on 1 April 1855, fulfilling the dream of local estate agent and civic leader William Winkley Junior, who published it from a small shop in High Street, Harrow on the Hill. By the 1880s, the publication had grown into a broadsheet and the cover price had risen by half a penny.

The Gazette lost its monopoly in April 1895 when non-conformist Robert A Smith launched the alternative Wealdstone, Harrow and Wembley Observer. In 1921, Oswald Mosley, then MP for Harrow, took over as editor of the Harrow Observer and under his command the two rivals merged. After several changes of owner, the newspaper came into the hands of Westminster Press, under whose tenure a 20-page midweek edition was published in 1967. The sister free paper, the Leader series, came into existence in 1983 and three years later the Harrow Observer switched from a broadsheet to tabloid format.

A large swathe of the photographic negatives archive was destroyed in a fire in 1992 and dark room developing became extinct when digital photography was introduced in 1998. Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest publisher, acquired the title in 2002 after a takeover and the editorial team moved to their sixth home in Lyon Road, Harrow. Its weekly circulation in early 2008 was recorded as 9,017.

Due to declines in the print market, the title became a digital-only publication, and the print edition of the newspaper closed with its final publication on 18 December 2014. Its off-shoot paper Wembley & Willesden Observer was also closed down.

References

(8 September 2005). "150 Years of the Harrow Observer". Harrow Observer.
(1999). "Parliament and politics in the age of Churchill and Attlee : the Headlam diaries, 1935-1951". Cambridge Univ. Press for the Royal Historical Society.
ABC/VFD figures April - May 2008
(14 November 2014). "Trinity Mirror to close seven regional newspapers". [[BBC News]].
(17 June 2014). "Wembley Observer | British Newspapers Online".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

weekly-newspapers-published-in-the-united-kingdom newspapers-established-in-1855 newspapers-disestablished-in-2014 1855-establishments-in-england newspapers-published-by-reach-plc 2014-disestablishments-in-england defunct-weekly-newspapers

Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Harrow Observer — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report