The Leveller
The Leveller is a free monthly newspaper serving towns and villages across Somerset in south-west England. It was first established in 2010 at Langport, on the Somerset Levels from which it takes its name, by its founder Andrew Lee. Beginning as the Langport Leveller, it grew into a small series of titles that included the Somerton Sentinel and the county-wide Somerset Leveller, before being bought in February 2024 by the independent publisher Blackmore Vale Ltd. It distributes around 15,000 copies a month, and its website is leveller.live.
Name and origins
The newspaper's name is a play on its home ground. Langport is a small town on the River Parrett at the heart of the Somerset Levels, the low-lying wetland plain that defines much of the central Somerset landscape. A paper published monthly at Langport and serving the Levels could hardly have been called anything else, although the title has occasionally caused confusion with publications of the same name elsewhere, including a magazine connected with the University of Somerset — an entirely separate undertaking. The Leveller discussed here is the Somerset local newspaper founded by Andrew Lee.
Lee launched the Langport edition in 2010 as an independent monthly. His founding premise, set out repeatedly in the paper's early years, was that Somerset was poorly served by its existing local newspapers. In his assessment, the county's established newsprint titles looked no further than their own town boundaries, were tabloid in both look and style, and too often filled their pages with lightly rewritten press releases rather than reporting that asked difficult questions. The Leveller was designed as the alternative: a paper willing to express an opinion, to challenge what was happening in the county, and to take a view across a wider area than a single town. Lee recalled that readers at the launch described the paper as a breath of fresh air — not necessarily because they agreed with everything it said, but because they found it a challenging and interesting read.
Growth into a series
The Langport Leveller was followed by a sister title for the neighbouring town of Somerton. The Somerton Sentinel was first published in 2011, extending the same approach to a second community a few miles east of Langport. A third, larger edition arrived in 2015: the Somerset Leveller, serving a broad swathe of the county including Bridgwater, Yeovil, Taunton, Street and Glastonbury. Together the three titles formed the Leveller series, all overseen by Lee from the paper's base at Westover in Langport.
By January 2018 the series had a circulation of over 9,000 copies. That month Lee launched a crowdfunding campaign to expand the business, hoping to raise between £5,000 and £20,000. The funds were intended to allow him to hire at least one additional journalist to work across the Langport Leveller, the Somerton Sentinel and the Somerset Leveller, and potentially to increase circulation, take on part-time distribution staff and fund work experience projects that might lead to employment for students and young people. Lee's pitch to potential backers was characteristically direct: rival printed newspapers' circulations were collapsing, readers were looking for an alternative, and people in parts of the county who wanted the paper could not always get hold of it. With extra financial help, he argued, circulation could be increased significantly.
Editorial approach
The Leveller's editorial identity was defined by its founder's critique of conventional local journalism. Lee complained that too much local news coverage was written in the passive voice, rarely dared to express an opinion or challenge events, and did not ask difficult questions. The Leveller aimed to do the opposite, and its reputation in the county was that of a paper with a voice — campaigning, questioning and sometimes deliberately provocative. That stance is reflected in the fact that when Lee later developed a subscription-based newsletter, Somerset Confidential, it was launched as a continuation of the same approach: reporting and analysis of Somerset public life that he believed was going unreported elsewhere.
The paper and the floods
No subject was more central to the Leveller's home patch than flooding. The Somerset Levels are a managed wetland landscape, much of it below sea level, and the winters of 2012, 2013 and above all 2013–14 brought devastating floods to the area around Langport. Fields near Lee's own home were under water for months during 2012 and 2013, and in the winter of 2013–14 the village of Muchelney was cut off and reached only by boat, while floodwater filled the Westover area of Langport itself, close to the offices from which the Leveller was published.
Lee became one of the most prominent local voices in the national and international debate that followed, as founder of a "Stop the Floods" advocacy group. Quoted in international reporting from the flooded Levels in February 2014, he argued that the landscape of the Levels was a carefully constructed one that had worked for centuries and had been left untended, blaming the decision taken in the 1990s to abandon the routine dredging of local rivers, whose capacity had fallen as silt accumulated. He expressed the anger felt locally that it had taken another major disaster for the area's plight to receive attention. For a newspaper whose very name referred to the Levels, the flooding crisis was not an abstract policy question but the defining story of the community it served — and its founder's campaigning role in that story was inseparable from the paper's identity.
The titles in the series
For clarity, the Leveller series as built up by its founder comprised three titles. The Langport Leveller, launched in 2010, was the original paper, serving Langport and the Levels communities around it. The Somerton Sentinel, first published in 2011, served Somerton. The Somerset Leveller, launched in 2015, was the county edition, serving towns including Bridgwater, Yeovil, Taunton, Street and Glastonbury. It is this wider Somerset title, distributed across the county, that the present-day newspaper most directly continues.
Somerset Confidential
Alongside the printed papers, Andrew Lee developed a subscription-based newsletter, Somerset Confidential, offering reporting and analysis of Somerset affairs for paying subscribers — priced at £30 a year — alongside free weekly editions. The newsletter, published from the same Langport milieu as the newspaper and originally branded Leveller Confidential, continued under Lee's editorship after the print title was sold, and its retrospective writing about flooding on the Levels, written from Westover in Langport, records the environment in which The Leveller was produced: the paper's offices stood in an area that the floodwaters filled in 2014.
Sale to Blackmore Vale Ltd
In February 2024, fourteen years after its foundation, The Leveller was sold to Blackmore Vale Ltd, an independent publisher based in the south-west. Blackmore Vale Ltd had been founded in 2020 when it revived the Blackmore Vale title, a former Reach-owned publication, and by the time of the Leveller purchase its stable already included the New Blackmore Vale, the Purbeck Gazette, the Salisbury & Avon Gazette and the New Stour & Avon. The Leveller joined that expanding portfolio of free titles in Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Somerset.
At the time of the sale, The Leveller was distributing 15,000 monthly copies across Somerset, serving towns including Bridgwater, Yeovil, Taunton, Street and Glastonbury — a substantial increase on the 9,000-plus circulation reported for the series in 2018. The new owners appointed Paul Jones, a former editor of the County Gazette and the Weston Mercury in Somerset, to edit The Leveller; Jones had joined the Blackmore Vale group as its editor in chief in 2022. The group's publisher, Lloyd Armishaw, said The Leveller was a respected title in Somerset and that the company would continue providing the news its readers expected while broadening the publication's horizons and putting it at the heart of the community. He set out the group's belief that providing reliable, balanced news was vital for both readers and advertisers, and said he aimed to continue expanding the group's footprint, with a target of publishing at least ten titles within eighteen months and opportunities being explored in North Somerset, mid and north Wiltshire, and south and west Hampshire.
Andrew Lee, the founder, did not disappear from Somerset journalism with the sale. He continued to run Somerset Confidential, the separate subscription-based newsletter that had grown out of his work on the Leveller, retaining the Leveller name for that undertaking in its earlier branding as Leveller Confidential. The print newspaper, meanwhile, continued under its new ownership and editorship.
Format, distribution and digital presence
The Leveller is a free monthly newspaper. Its distribution, at 15,000 copies a month at the time of its sale in 2024, is spread across a wide and largely rural county, from its original Langport and Somerton heartland to the county town of Taunton and the towns of Bridgwater, Yeovil, Street and Glastonbury. Free distribution across such an area is logistically demanding — one reason its founder's 2018 crowdfunding appeal identified part-time distribution staff as one of the uses to which new funding would be put — but it allows the paper to reach readers who might not buy a local title, and to offer advertisers coverage across town boundaries in a way that its founder argued the established town-based papers did not.
Alongside the printed paper, The Leveller maintains a website at leveller.live, through which its content is available digitally. The combination of a monthly print edition with a continuous online presence follows the pattern of many independent free titles, for which print provides local visibility and advertising reach while the website carries the title's identity between editions.
Significance
The Leveller's significance in British local media lies in the combination of longevity and growth it achieved as an independent start-up. Founded in a single small town in 2010, it expanded in stages — a second town in 2011, a county edition in 2015 — increased its circulation, survived the pressures that closed many established titles around it, and was ultimately acquired in 2024 by another growing independent publisher, under which it continues to appear. Its history also illustrates a distinctive strand of local journalism: the founder-led, opinionated paper, rooted in the landscape and grievances of its patch, in this case the flood-prone Somerset Levels whose name it bears. From its Langport beginnings to its place in the Blackmore Vale portfolio, The Leveller remains one of the more durable independent newspaper ventures launched in England in the 2010s.
