Our history, and the newspaper whose name we took

Barnet Press is a new digital local news publication for the London Borough of Barnet, launched in 2026 by an independent publisher. It is not the original Barnet Press newspaper, which ran from 1859 until July 2017, and has no corporate, editorial or family connection to it. It has taken the name forward, not the title itself.

1859, and the Cowing family

Local history sources, among them the Barnet Society, date the paper’s founding to 1859, in Barnet, by George Cowing. It remained family-owned and politically independent for more than a century, which is an unusual length of time for any newspaper to stay out of a group.

One honest qualification. The surviving digitised run held by the British Newspaper Archive begins in 1861, not 1859. The 1859 date comes from local history rather than from the archive, and we would rather say which claim rests on which source than smooth the two together.

What survives

The British Newspaper Archive holds 16,812 pages of the Barnet Press across 2,148 issues, covering 1861 to 1862 and 1879 to 1919. If you are researching the borough’s past, that archive is the source. We hold none of it.

The paper itself has no Wikipedia entry. A weekly that reported on a London borough for over a century and a half left no encyclopaedia article behind, which is part of why a record like this one is worth keeping at all.

The 1926 General Strike

During the 1926 General Strike the Barnet Press kept printing while the national dailies were stopped. It published a special daily edition carrying BBC bulletins, and sold a “5 o’clock National Emergency Edition” in central London.

Whatever you make of the politics of that week, a local weekly getting a paper out when the national press could not is the sort of thing local journalism exists to be able to do.

People

• John Motson, later the BBC’s leading football commentator, began his career on the Barnet Press.
• Gwyneth Cowing, of the founding family, was a local benefactor. She provided a studio for the Barnet Guild of Artists and housing for the Barnet Beekeepers Association.

Who owned it

The Cowing estate trustees sold the paper in the 1990s. The buyer is not documented in the sources we can point at, and we are not going to guess at it here.

It later belonged to Trinity Mirror, which in August 2007 sold 27 London weekly titles, including the Barnet Press, to Tindle Newspapers for £18.75m. Tindle was its final owner, latterly through North London and Essex News Ltd of Enfield.

July 2017

The Barnet Press closed in July 2017. The final edition was published on Thursday 27 July 2017, alongside the Enfield Advertiser & Gazette and the Haringey Advertiser. Sixteen staff faced redundancy, six of them editorial. Deputy editor McGrath said “economic reality has finally bitten”, citing falling circulation, reduced advertising and competition from the internet, as Press Gazette reported at the time.

Its coverage in that final period included the future of Chase Farm Hospital, a spate of knife attacks, and a long-running dispute over cycle lanes. Those are the sort of stories a borough stops hearing about when its paper goes.

It was not an isolated closure. Press Gazette counts a net loss of at least 271 print local newspaper titles in the UK since 2005, and 2017 was one of the worst years on that count, with 30 titles lost.

What happened to the address

The domain barnetpress.co.uk carried the newspaper’s own website. The Internet Archive’s earliest capture of it is from August 2008, and by 2014 the address was redirecting elsewhere. The paper closed in 2017 and the domain later lapsed. It was bought in 2026 by the present publisher, which is how this site comes to be at it.

What we are not

We are not the original Barnet Press, and we do not claim to be. We are not its company, we do not employ its staff, and we hold none of its archive. There is no continuity between the two publications: no revival, no relaunch, no continuous volume numbering, and no claim on anything the original reported. Its work belongs to the people who did it.

Where 1859 appears on this site, it is the age of the name and not the age of this publication, which began in 2026. The same point is made on our about page, and we would rather repeat it than let a number imply a lineage we have not earned.

Why keep the name at all

Because the history should not die quietly. A title that reported on the London Borough of Barnet for over a century and a half, that kept printing through the General Strike and gave John Motson his first job, deserves to be findable rather than forgotten.

And because we believe in free expression and a free press. Barnet lost the paper that carried this name, and we are doing the work of local reporting here under it. That is continuing a job, not continuing a company.

This is an AI-assisted newsroom under human editorial supervision. Saying so is deliberate. A publication that asks readers to trust its account of the borough should be first to say how that account is produced, and our methodology page sets out the process in full.

Write for us

We are recruiting editors and contributors. If you know Barnet, can report on it accurately and want a place to publish, we would like to hear from you. That includes people who want to edit rather than write, and people who have never been paid for journalism before.

Write to editor@barnetpress.co.uk with what you would like to cover, which part of the borough you know, and anything you have written before. There is no form to fill in.

Common questions