The Leamington Courier

About The Leamington Courier

Overview

The Leamington Courier is a weekly newspaper published in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, serving the Regency spa town and the surrounding district of central Warwickshire. Founded in 1828, it is the town's oldest newspaper and one of the oldest continuously published local titles in England, with a history that stretches back nearly two hundred years. The paper is published weekly and is now part of the Iconic Media Group, the publisher formerly known as National World, having passed through the hands of Johnston Press and JPI Media over the decades. Its editorial base has long been at 32 Hamilton Terrace, Leamington Spa, the same offices shared with its sister titles. The newspaper's news operation continues online at leamingtoncourier.co.uk, where local news, sport and features are published alongside the weekly print edition.

Founding in 1828

The Leamington Spa Courier was founded in 1828 as a weekly broadsheet by the printer John Fairfax and James Sharp senior, making it the first newspaper to be published in Leamington. The town was then a fashionable spa resort growing rapidly on the wealth of its fashionable visitors, and the new paper set out to serve the agricultural, commercial and manufacturing interests of the district as well as the visitors taking the waters. From the outset the Courier carried a distinctly Conservative outlook, a stance that would shape its politics for much of the nineteenth century. The partnership between its two founders, however, did not last long. Political differences encouraged the two men to go their separate ways: Fairfax, a Liberal, left the Courier after his views clashed with the Conservative outlook of Sharp's son, who edited the paper.

John Fairfax and the Sydney Morning Herald

John Fairfax's departure from the Leamington Courier led him, by a roundabout route, to one of the most remarkable careers in newspaper history. Fairfax had been born in Warwick on 25 October 1804 and, aged twelve, had been apprenticed to a local printer before setting up business as a printer and bookbinder at 26 Clemens Street, Leamington, in January 1827. After leaving the Courier he started the unsuccessful Leamington Chronicle, but was bankrupted by a vexatious libel action. Seeking a new life, he emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 and took over a local newspaper which he transformed into the Sydney Morning Herald. The paper became one of the leading newspapers of the Australian colony and the empire as a whole, and it remained in the Fairfax family for a further 149 years, until the 1980s. Although no longer run by the Fairfax family, the Sydney Morning Herald remains Australia's leading newspaper, a legacy that traces back directly to the man who founded the Leamington Courier.

The Victorian years: Liebenrood and Glover

After Fairfax's departure, the Courier was bought by George Christopher Liebenrood. Under his ownership it remained a Conservative paper, strongly supportive of the Church of England and aimed at agricultural, commercial and manufacturing interests. The paper was then purchased by the bookseller and printer Joseph Glover, who became one of Leamington's most prominent citizens. Glover served as a Justice of the Peace from 1876 and was nominated for the mayoralty in 1891, an honour he declined. He also rose to the top of the provincial press nationally, serving as President of the Provincial Newspaper Society in 1870 and Chairman of the Press Association in 1874. Control of the paper later passed to his son Frank Glover, who was chairman and managing director of Leamington Spa Courier Ltd when he died in 1929. The Glover family's long stewardship gave the Courier a stability that carried it through the Victorian and Edwardian eras as the voice of the spa town.

Title changes across two centuries

Like many long-lived newspapers, the Courier has appeared under a succession of mastheads as it absorbed rival titles and changed format. Archival listings held by the British Newspaper Archive trace the paper's titles in detail: the Leamington Spa Courier of 1828–39, followed by The Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard from 1838 to 1878, then the Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard from 1878 to 1913, the Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard from 1914 to 1954, the Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard from 1950 to 1988, a brief Royal Leamington Spa Courier in 1988–89, the Leamington Spa Courier (1989) from 1989 to 2003, and finally the Courier (Leamington, England) from 2003 to 2005. The "Royal" in the title reflects Leamington's status as Royal Leamington Spa, a prefix granted by Queen Victoria in 1838, while the Warwickshire Standard element records the absorption of a county title into the paper's circulation area.

The daily sister: the Leamington Morning News

For part of the twentieth century the Courier had a now-defunct sister daily, the Leamington Morning News, which gave the town's newspaper group a daily voice alongside the weekly Courier. The two titles were edited together in the 1960s and 1970s, with the same editorial leadership running both the weekly and its daily stablemate. The daily's eventual closure left the Courier as the sole surviving newspaper of the group in the town, a reminder of how many provincial daily titles were lost to consolidation and changing reading habits in the later twentieth century. The Courier's archive, stretching back to 1828, remains a continuous record of life in Leamington Spa across nearly two centuries, from the Regency heyday of the spas through two world wars to the present day.

Editors: John Algar and Martin Lawson

Two editors shaped the modern Courier over nearly half a century. John Algar was appointed editor of the Leamington Courier in 1962 and, five years later, also took its sister daily the Leamington Morning News under his wing as editor-in-chief. He remained in charge of both titles until 1979, retiring three years later, and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Born in May 1918, Algar had begun his career on the Bridlington Free Press, served throughout the Second World War with the British Expeditionary Force and later in Norway, and held his first editorship at the Sleaford Standard in 1951 before moving to the Yorkshire Post and two of its weekly sister papers. His successor, Martin Lawson, edited the Courier from 1979 until his retirement in 2010, more than thirty years at the helm. Lawson had been at one point Britain's youngest editor and went on to hold senior management responsibilities with EMAP and then Johnston Press. He began as a trainee reporter with the Rugby Advertiser, and his long editorship won him several awards before his death in August 2024 at the age of 76.

Ownership: from Johnston Press to Iconic Media

The Courier's corporate history mirrors the consolidation of the British regional press. For many years it was part of Johnston Press, one of the country's largest regional publishers, whose annual statements listed the Leamington Spa Courier among its Midlands titles. When Johnston Press's newspaper business was bought out of administration in 2018 it became JPI Media, and at the start of 2021 JPI Media was itself acquired by National World, a takeover vehicle led by industry veteran David Montgomery, in a £10.2 million deal. In May 2025 National World was in turn taken over by Media Concierge Group, the Irish media business headed by Malcolm Denmark, in a £65 million deal that took the business private. In October 2025 the former National World operation was rebranded as Iconic Media, reuniting its more than two hundred British titles with the Irish titles Denmark had previously owned. The Leamington Courier now sits within that portfolio, published alongside its Warwickshire sister titles.

Sister titles in Warwickshire

The Courier is published in a stable of Warwickshire weeklies that also includes the Warwick Courier and the Kenilworth Weekly News, titles that share editorial resources and the same Hamilton Terrace offices in Leamington Spa. Directory listings give the editorial contact details for the group as 32 Hamilton Terrace, Leamington Spa, CV32 4LY, telephone 01926 457777, with editorial email handled through the Courier's own address. The Warwick Courier serves the historic county town of Warwick and its surroundings, while the Kenilworth Weekly News serves Kenilworth and neighbouring villages. Together the three titles cover the central Warwickshire towns along the corridor from Coventry to Leamington Spa, each maintaining its own masthead, website and local identity while operating under the same ownership.

Coverage and the modern paper

Today the Leamington Courier covers the news of Royal Leamington Spa, one of England's finest Regency spa towns, whose pump rooms, parades and crescents remain the setting for much of the town's civic life. The paper reports on Warwick District Council and the town's parish and town councils, on planning and development, schools, health services, transport and crime, alongside local sport and community news from the surrounding Warwickshire villages. Its website, leamingtoncourier.co.uk, publishes news online between print editions and carries the title's sport, features and notices. After nearly two centuries in print, the Courier remains the newspaper of record for Leamington Spa, a title founded when the town was at the height of its spa-town fame and still chronicling its life in the twenty-first century.