About Herts and Essex Observer

Herts and Essex Observer

The Herts and Essex Observer was a weekly newspaper for Bishop's Stortford and the border country where Hertfordshire meets Essex. Founded in 1861 and printed in Bishop's Stortford, it served its communities for more than a century and a half before its publisher, Reach plc, closed it in January 2019. Its final editions appeared in the week commencing 28 January 2019, ending the run of a title that had begun in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign and had chronicled its patch through every transformation of modern British life.

The Observer's history is written in the past tense, but its importance to its area did not end entirely with its closure. The paper's archive, its former offices and even its successor title all testify to the role it played. For generations it was the printed record of Bishop's Stortford and the towns and villages around it, and its disappearance left a gap that others moved, only partly, to fill.

Founded in 1861

The Observer was first published in 1861, with the paper initially known as the Bishop Stortford Observer in 1862. It was printed in Bishop's Stortford, the market town that remained its home and the centre of its circulation area. The founding came at a time when the repeal of the newspaper taxes was opening the way for cheaper local papers across England, and a growing town on the Hertfordshire and Essex border was a natural place for such a venture.

The title the paper eventually carried, Herts and Essex Observer, described its territory precisely. Its patch straddled a county boundary, taking in Bishop's Stortford and the surrounding communities of east Hertfordshire and the neighbouring part of Essex, including the Dunmow and Stansted area, which had its own edition in later years. A paper serving two counties had to understand two sets of councils, markets and loyalties, and that border identity became one of its defining characteristics.

Title History and the Archive

The surviving archive traces the paper's naming history with unusual clarity. Runs held in newspaper libraries cover the Bishop's Stortford Observer from 1862 to 1979, continue under that name in variant form from 1979 to 1982, and then follow the Herts and Essex Observer from 1982 to 2000. Such sequences show how a single continuous newspaper could pass through several mastheads while remaining, to its readers, the same local institution throughout.

The scale of the preserved record is considerable. The British Newspaper Archive holds 10,027 pages of the paper for the years 1984 to 1985 and 1988 among its digitised holdings, and the wider run catalogued by Findmypast spans well over a century of editions. For local and family historians in east Hertfordshire and west Essex, those pages are a primary source: reports of councils and courts, school and church news, planning arguments and sporting fixtures, recorded weekly by journalists working in the community they described.

Herts and Essex Newspapers and the Hertford Base

For much of its modern life the Observer was published by Herts & Essex Newspapers, part of Iliffe News and Media. The group worked from historic premises in Fore Street, Hertford, which it had used for nearly 150 years before moving in 2003 to Ware Road in Hertford. The Observer thus belonged to a family of Hertfordshire titles produced from the county town, while retaining its own Bishop's Stortford identity and office for its local reporting.

That structure, a local masthead within a county group, was the standard pattern of the mature regional press. It allowed titles like the Observer to draw on shared printing, advertising and management resources while fielding their own reporters on their own ground. The arrangement sustained the paper through decades in which a wholly independent weekly in a town of Bishop's Stortford's size would have struggled to carry the costs of modern production alone.

The Final Years in Bishop's Stortford

The Observer's physical presence in its home town ended before the paper itself did. Its Bishop's Stortford office was closed by publisher Trinity Mirror in 2016, and staff were relocated away from the town. Editor Paul Winspear, who had edited the Observer for ten years, was made redundant in July 2016, as was news editor Sinead Corr. The departures marked the end of an era in which the paper's senior journalists worked on the streets they covered.

The loss of the office proved to be a beginning as well as an ending. In October 2017 Iliffe Media launched the Bishop's Stortford Independent, edited by Winspear with Corr on the launch team and based in the Observer's former office in the town. The new paper's existence testified to the strength of the local news tradition the Observer had built: journalists who had served the old title believed the town would support a weekly of its own, and events justified them. The Observer, meanwhile, continued publication from outside the town for a little over two more years.

Circulation and Closure in 2019

The last published circulation figure for the Observer was 5,184 for January to December 2017, a sale that would once have been respectable for a town weekly but which, combined with falling print advertising, left the title exposed. On 23 January 2019 Reach plc, which had inherited the paper through the industry's chain of mergers, announced that the Herts and Essex Observer would close, together with the Harlow Star and the Buckinghamshire Advertiser and Examiner. Reach attributed the decision to the continued decline in local print advertising and described publication of the titles as unsustainable.

The final editions appeared in the week commencing 28 January 2019. Reach stated that the closures would involve no editorial redundancies, with staff absorbed elsewhere in the group. That softened the human impact but not the civic one: a newspaper founded in 1861, which had reported its area through the arrival of the railway age's maturity, two world wars and the growth of Stansted Airport, ceased to exist as a printed voice for Bishop's Stortford and its border country.

What the Observer Covered

The Observer's patch gave its journalism a particular flavour. Bishop's Stortford itself, the villages of east Hertfordshire, and the Essex towns and villages towards Dunmow and Stansted Mountfitchet formed a semi-rural territory increasingly shaped by London commuting and by the expansion of Stansted Airport. The paper's editions, including the Bishop's Stortford edition and the Dunmow and Stansted edition, had to serve established rural communities and fast-growing commuter settlements at the same time, a combination that produced rich material on planning, development, schools and transport.

Its sports coverage carried similar local weight. The paper followed Bishop's Stortford's football and the Harlow Town teams among others, with dedicated sports reporters whose departures and appointments were themselves news within the regional press. Club football at that level depends on the local paper for its public record, and the Observer's reporting formed part of the documented history of sport across its area for decades.

After the Closure

The Observer's closure did not leave Bishop's Stortford without a newspaper, because the Bishop's Stortford Independent was already established in its former office. In March 2019 the Independent announced plans to expand into Sawbridgeworth and Stansted Mountfitchet, towns previously served by the Observer, recruiting additional reporting capacity to cover them. Its editor reported that the Independent's sales had risen by more than 1,000 copies in the weeks after the Observer folded. The succession was unusually direct: a new paper, staffed by the old paper's journalists, extending itself across the old paper's territory.

That outcome says much about the Observer's legacy. Reach judged the title unsustainable within a large group's economics, yet a smaller publisher, working to a local model, found an audience on the same ground. The difference lay less in the community's appetite for local news than in the cost structures of the organisations serving it. The Observer's 158 years had proved the demand; its closure proved how difficult the traditional group model had become.

An Enduring Record

Defunct though it is, the Herts and Essex Observer remains present in its area through its archive. The tens of thousands of pages preserved in newspaper libraries hold the detailed history of Bishop's Stortford and the Herts and Essex border from 1862 onwards: the arguments, celebrations, crimes, matches and markets of a community recorded by its own paper. Researchers reconstructing the past of any town or family on its patch will find the Observer an unavoidable source.

The paper's story, from its 1861 founding to its closure in a single week of January 2019, encapsulates the trajectory of the British local weekly. Born in the age of cheap print, sustained by group ownership, weakened by the loss of its local office and finally closed when advertising economics turned against it, it nevertheless left behind both a documentary record and a successor title. Few newspapers can claim as much afterlife as that.