Cherwell is the independent student newspaper of the University of Oxford, published entirely by students since 1920. One of the oldest and largest student publications in the United Kingdom, it is owned and operated by Oxford Student Publications Limited, a student publishing house with no ties to the university administration or the student union, and it appears five times each term in print, delivered to the vast majority of Oxford colleges as well as other strategic locations across the city.
Founding in 1920
Cherwell was conceived by two Balliol College students, Cecil Binney and George Adolphus Edinger, on a ferry from Dover to Ostend during the summer vacation of 1920, while the pair were travelling to Vienna to do relief work for the Save the Children charity. Edinger later recalled the early newspaper having a radical voice, describing the founders as feeling for a new Oxford: anti-convention, anti-pre-war values, pro-feminist, unafraid of shocking their readers, and frequently doing so. From its first number the publication was independent of the University of Oxford and was entirely financed, staffed and owned by students.
The newspaper takes its name from the River Cherwell, the Thames tributary that flows past Oxford's colleges, anchoring the paper's identity in the city itself. Its first editorial set out a defiant purpose: to exclude all outside influence and interference from the university — Oxford for the Oxonians.
The General Strike of 1926
Cherwell earned a remarkable place in British press history during the UK General Strike of May 1926. When the strike halted national newspaper production, Cherwell was one of the only newspapers still printed in Britain — the others being the government-backed British Gazette and the Trades Union Congress's British Worker. Cherwell's strike editions were produced at the offices of the Daily Mail in London, a feat that underlined both the paper's resourcefulness and its growing stature as a genuine newspaper rather than a mere student pastime.
A Literary Tradition
Throughout the 1920s Cherwell had a strong literary focus and a policy of not editing literary contributions. Undergraduate contributors included names that would become some of the most celebrated in twentieth-century English literature: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, L. P. Hartley, Cecil Day-Lewis and W. H. Auden. The unedited contributions policy meant that raw, youthful work by future masters appeared in its pages exactly as the authors submitted it, giving the paper a distinctive blend of seriousness, whimsy and parochialism that early readers relished.
This literary inheritance became one of Cherwell's defining characteristics, setting it apart from student newspapers that confined themselves to campus politics and reviews. The paper's pages carried poetry, short fiction and literary criticism alongside news, establishing a tradition of writing that later generations of editors worked hard to sustain.
Editorial Independence
A particular advantage Cherwell has over most student newspapers is its complete editorial independence from any student union or other body. Oxford Student Publications Limited is a student publishing house funded through common room subscriptions and advertising, receiving no university funding. This structural independence has allowed Cherwell to criticise university and student union policies freely, including campaigns around Oxford University Student Union elections and debates such as the controversial 2007 invitation of Nick Griffin and David Irving to the Oxford Union.
The rival Oxford Student newspaper, by contrast, is subsidised by the university through the student union, making Cherwell the only fully independent student newspaper in Oxford. That independence has occasionally been tested by financial strain: in the early 2000s the paper fell into deep debt, owing tens of thousands of pounds to its printers and to the government in unpaid taxes, and survived only with an emergency bank loan that gave a new student editorial team time to stabilise the finances.
Notable Alumni
Cherwell's alumni roll reads like a directory of British journalism and public life. Rupert Murdoch, who would go on to build one of the world's great media empires, worked on the paper as an undergraduate. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and the literary stars of the 1920s were followed by later generations of writers, broadcasters and politicians. Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper reported for Cherwell as a student in the late 1980s, covering the circle of young Conservatives — including future prime ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron, and Jacob Rees-Mogg — who would go on to dominate British politics, later chronicling them in his book Chums.
The paper has long served as a training ground for Fleet Street and beyond, with former editors and contributors moving into national newspapers, broadcasting and publishing. Its reputation as a serious apprenticeship in journalism is one of the reasons it attracts ambitious student writers from across the university.
Print and Digital Editions
Cherwell is published in print five times each term and is distributed free to the vast majority of Oxford colleges and other strategic locations in the city. Its print editions have won awards for design, and its website and social media channels are updated daily with breaking news, analysis, features, cultural coverage, sport and lifestyle content. The digital operation has grown to reach tens of thousands of readers — undergraduates and postgraduates, alumni, academics and prospective students — across the country and beyond.
The paper is listed with the print ISSN 0308-731X and the web ISSN 1742-3597, and its official website is cherwell.org. The online edition has become the paper's reference point for Oxford history and university life, extending the reach of a title that began as a paper journal for a single university.
Campus Rivalry
Oxford's student media scene is dominated by two great rivals: Cherwell and the Oxford Student (OxStu). The two papers have competed for readers, stories and prestige for decades. Cherwell has traditionally been seen as the more glamorous choice, noted for superior design and a stronger website, while OxStu has at times had the edge in news coverage, with award-winning news journalists. Neither paper carries an expressed political line; editorial politics vary from editor to editor and from term to term.
The rivalry extends beyond the two newspapers to Oxford's magazines — Isis, Etcetera and the Oxford Forum among them — but the Cherwell–OxStu contest remains the central dynamic of student journalism in the city, each paper's scoops and missteps scrutinised by the other's staff and by the wider university community.
Coverage and Content
Modern Cherwell covers university and city news, student politics, investigations, features, opinion, culture, sport and lifestyle. Its news pages have reported on university governance, college controversies, protests and national stories with an Oxford angle. The features and culture sections continue the literary tradition of the paper's early decades, while the website's daily updates have made it a faster, more immediate operation than the fortnightly or weekly print cycle of earlier eras.
The paper's articles serve as a reference point for Oxford history: researchers and alumni mine its archives for accounts of university life across more than a century, from the post-First World War radicalism of the 1920s to the present day.
Cherwell Today
More than a century after Cecil Binney and George Edinger dreamed it up on a cross-Channel ferry, Cherwell remains what its first editorial promised: a newspaper by and for Oxonians, independent of outside influence. It has survived wars, strikes, financial crises and the transformation of the media industry, adapting from a literary weekly of the 1920s to a multi-platform student news operation with daily digital output and a five-times-a-term print edition.
As one of the oldest and largest student publications in the UK, Cherwell continues to train each new generation of Oxford journalists, to hold the university and its student union to account, and to record the life of one of the world's most famous universities in print and online.
