Asian Times
Asian Times is a British Asian newspaper title based in London, England. It was launched in 1983 as a weekly newspaper serving the United Kingdom's South Asian community, published in London by Hansib Publications. After a series of ownership changes through the 1990s and 2000s, the print weekly was folded into its sister title, the Eastern Eye, at the end of 2006. Media directory listings subsequently associate the Asian Times name with the Asian Media & Marketing Group and its website, asiantimesonline.co.uk. It should not be confused with the entirely separate Asia Times, a Hong Kong-based English-language news outlet.
Overview
Asian Times was created as an English-language weekly newspaper aimed at Britain's South Asian diaspora — readers of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan origin living across the United Kingdom. For more than two decades it formed part of the small but significant stable of ethnic-minority press titles in Britain, sitting alongside the Eastern Eye, New Nation and Caribbean Times under the Ethnic Media Group. The paper carried news from South Asia alongside British domestic news, community affairs, sport, entertainment and advertising targeted at Asian readers. At the height of its print run it was one of the longest-running weekly titles for the UK's Asian communities, predating many of the digital-era Asian news outlets that later crowded the same space.
The user-edited media directory media.info lists Asian Times among the titles owned by the Asian Media & Marketing Group, alongside Eastern Eye UK, Eastern Eye Scotland and India Weekly, and gives its contact details as 779 High Road, Leytonstone, London E11 4QS, with the telephone number +44 20 8558 9127 and the official website asiantimesonline.co.uk. What exactly the title publishes today is less clearly documented than its twentieth-century history, but its print heritage as a weekly newspaper between 1983 and 2006 is firmly established.
Founding by Hansib Publications in 1983
Asian Times was launched in 1983 by Hansib Publications, the London publishing house run by Arif Ali. Hansib was already well known for the Caribbean Times, one of Britain's most prominent Black weekly newspapers and an important anti-racist campaigning voice. In bringing out a weekly Asian paper, Ali extended his publishing operation into the South Asian readership, recognising that Britain's Asian communities — then numbering in the millions and growing rapidly — lacked a dedicated English-language weekly that combined subcontinental news with British Asian community coverage.
The following year, in 1984, Hansib brought out the African Times, completing a trio of diaspora weeklies. Together the three titles — Asian Times, African Times and Caribbean Times — gave Hansib Publications a distinctive position in the British press: a Black-owned publishing house serving the country's Caribbean, African and South Asian communities at a time when the mainstream national press paid them little systematic attention.
The Hansib Years
Through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Asian Times operated as a weekly newspaper under Hansib's ownership. Like its sister papers, it was a commercial title aimed at a defined community audience, carrying news from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka alongside coverage of British Asian life — immigration issues, community politics, business, culture, Bollywood and sport. The paper was sold through newsagents and Asian shops in areas of significant South Asian settlement, including London, the Midlands and the North of England.
During this period the title competed and coexisted with the Eastern Eye, which had been founded in 1989 by Sarwar Ahmed and first published by The Guardian before becoming a standalone newspaper. Both papers chased the same broad British Asian readership, and the rivalry and interplay between them would shape the market for decades.
The 1997 Sale
In 1997 Arif Ali sold off the newspapers he had built up, choosing to concentrate Hansib Publications on its book-publishing programme instead. The sale marked the end of the Hansib era for Asian Times. The titles passed out of his hands, and the Caribbean Times — and with it the wider stable of titles — was subsequently published by Ethnic Media Group Ltd, the company formed out of a management buyout from the Trinity Mirror group.
The Ethnic Media Group (EMG) became the new home for the Asian Times, the Eastern Eye, the New Nation (launched in 1996 for the Afro-Caribbean market) and the Caribbean Times, which by then incorporated the African Times. EMG's strategy was to run a small portfolio of community weeklies with shared resources, giving each paper the scale to survive in a tough advertising market.
The Ethnic Media Group Years
Under the Ethnic Media Group, Asian Times continued as a weekly newspaper through the late 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. EMG developed the titles together: in 2006 it launched an Eastern Eye Scotland edition, which the group's managing director Wayne Bower said had been received with "great enthusiasm" by the Asian communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Eastern Eye won the Newspaper of the Year Award at the UK Asian Music Awards that same year.
But the economics of weekly community print were deteriorating. Neither the circulation of the Asian Times nor that of the Caribbean Times was independently audited, and both were described by the group as underperforming as print advertising and readership shifted.
The 2006 Closure and Merger with Eastern Eye
In December 2006, the Ethnic Media Group announced that it was axing its two longstanding titles, the Caribbean Times and Asian Times. The two weekly newspapers ceased to be published at the beginning of December and were folded into their sister EMG titles: the Caribbean Times merged with the New Nation, and Asian Times merged with the Eastern Eye. The trade press reported that from 2007 the Eastern Eye would have four local editions covering London, the Midlands, the North and Scotland, while the New Nation would be published in three editions for London, the Midlands and the North of England. EMG said it would increase distribution of the two surviving titles in areas with strong ethnic communities, and that the foreign coverage which had previously appeared in the Caribbean Times and Asian Times would now appear in the main titles to serve the readers of the defunct papers.
Wayne Bower, EMG's managing director, explained the rationale: "What we would like to do is put our resources at EMG into those core titles. The changes will mean we can produce newspapers that are much closer to the communities we serve." The move brought down the curtain on Asian Times' twenty-three-year run as a standalone weekly newspaper.
Administration and the Sale of Title Rights
The Ethnic Media Group's troubles did not end with the 2006 consolidation. The group went into administration in 2009, and the rights to the Caribbean Times and its other titles were sold off. It was in this round of asset sales that the remaining value of the Asian Times name — a masthead with more than two decades of recognition among British Asian readers — changed hands.
The Eastern Eye, into which Asian Times had been merged, was itself sold in 2009 to the Asian Media & Marketing Group, presently known as the Asian Media Group (AMG). The AMG, described by the property news outlet CoStar in 2024 as Britain's largest Asian publishing house — it bought the City of London office building at 41 Moorgate for £16.5 million that year — rebuilt the Eastern Eye around its annual Asian Rich List, the Asian Business Awards and its Top 50 Asian Celebrities lists, under editor Ramniklal Solanki.
The Asian Media & Marketing Group Connection
Media directory sources list Asian Times among the titles owned by the Asian Media & Marketing Group, alongside Eastern Eye UK, Eastern Eye Scotland and India Weekly. The listing gives a London contact address in Leytonstone and the official website asiantimesonline.co.uk. The batch records for the worldnm.com directory similarly describe Asian Times as a British Asian weekly newspaper published in London by the Asian Media & Marketing Group, serving the UK's South Asian community.
Exactly how the title is being used within the AMG stable today is not documented in the public record with the same detail as its twentieth-century print history. What is clear is that the Asian Times name survived the 2006 closure and the 2009 administration as a recognised brand in the British Asian media market, and that the Asian Media & Marketing Group is the company most consistently associated with its ownership in media directories.
Distinguishing Asian Times from Asia Times
Readers encountering the name should take care not to confuse the British paper with the Asia Times, an entirely separate and unrelated publication. Asia Times (Chinese: 亞洲時報) is a Hong Kong-based English-language news media publishing group covering politics, economics, business and culture from an Asian perspective, publishing in English and simplified Chinese from newsrooms in Bangkok and Hong Kong with support from bureaus in Seoul, Beijing, Singapore and New York. Its origins lie in the Bangkok-based print newspaper Asia Times launched in 1995 and closed in 1997, and in Asia Times Online, created in 1999. It has no connection to the London-based British Asian weekly described in this article.
Legacy in the British Asian Press
Asian Times' legacy is that of a pioneer. Launched in 1983, it was among the first English-language weeklies created specifically for Britain's South Asian communities, and it helped establish the commercial template — community news, subcontinental coverage, entertainment, targeted advertising — that later titles would follow. Its passage from Hansib Publications through the Ethnic Media Group and into the Asian Media & Marketing Group's orbit mirrors the wider consolidation of Britain's ethnic-minority press: from idealistic independent publishers in the 1970s and 1980s, through leveraged groups in the 2000s, to the handful of specialist publishers that remain today.
Today the British Asian press landscape that Asian Times helped to create includes the Eastern Eye, the fortnightly Asian Today in the Midlands, Asian Lite, Asian Sunday and Asian Standard in the North, and the Asian Image in the North West. The Asian Times masthead — whether remembered as the 1983–2006 weekly or as the AMG-associated title listed in media directories — remains part of that lineage.
