About Hampstead and Highgate Express

Hampstead and Highgate Express

The Hampstead and Highgate Express, known universally to its readers as the Ham & High, is a weekly paid newspaper for Hampstead and Highgate in the London Borough of Camden, published on Thursdays. Founded in 1860, it is one of the oldest surviving local newspapers in London, serving two of the capital's most distinctive and historically literate districts. A paper that was reporting on Hampstead when the area was still a village on London's edge has continued, through the suburb's absorption into the metropolis, to provide the close local scrutiny its readers expect.

The Express carries the ISSN 1366-9192 and has appeared under a succession of owners, most recently Newsquest. Its circulation was 3,944 in 2021, a figure that understates its influence in an area where the local paper's reporting on planning, schools, hospitals and the Heath carries weight disproportionate to raw sales. The Ham & High's history connects the Victorian village press to the modern London weekly, and includes a small but famous footnote in national newspaper history: its printing office gave an early helping hand to Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe.

Founded in 1860

The Hampstead and Highgate Express was founded in 1860, at a time when Hampstead and Highgate were still recognisably separate settlements, prized for their clean air and elevation above the city. A local newspaper for the two communities was a natural product of the cheaper print era that followed the repeal of the newspaper taxes. The new paper could record the life of parishes that London-wide titles mentioned only in passing, and build its readership on the particular loyalties of village and suburb.

The paper's full name yoked together two places with strong and sometimes rival identities. Serving both required the Express to be even-handed between Hampstead and Highgate while speaking to what they shared: the Heath between them, the pressures of London's growth, and a population increasingly composed of the writers, artists, professionals and public figures who made the area famous. That dual brief has remained the paper's defining task ever since.

George Jealous and the Holly Mount Printing Office

The formative figure of the paper's first decades was George Jealous, who edited the Express from 1862 to 1897. Thirty-five years in the editor's chair gave the young paper stability, character and local knowledge of a depth no short tenure could match. Under Jealous, the paper was printed at Holly Mount in Hampstead, and its pages developed the detailed chronicling of local life for which it became known. An 1886 series on well-known residents, for example, profiled the artist George du Maurier, capturing the area's celebrated population in the paper's own columns.

Jealous's most famous act was one of generosity. He gifted a printing press to Alfred Harmsworth, the young man who would become Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail and the most powerful newspaper proprietor of his age. The gift from the editor of a Hampstead weekly to the future press baron is a cherished episode in the Express's history, linking the modest Holly Mount printing office to the birth of the modern popular press. Few local papers can claim a direct, personal connection to a figure of Harmsworth's consequence.

A Paper for a Literary District

The Express's patch has always given its journalism unusual material. Hampstead and Highgate have been home to generations of writers, artists, scientists and politicians, and a local paper in such a district reports on national figures at parish level: their planning applications, their school fetes, their disputes over the Heath. Handled well, that material makes a local paper read far beyond its circulation area, and the Express built a reputation for literate, closely observed journalism that matched the character of its readers.

The paper's own historical record shows that depth. Its nineteenth-century columns are quoted by historians of the area for their accounts of residents and of landmarks such as the Bull and Bush tavern by the Heath, whose story the Express retailed in 1888 with the relish of a paper that knew its readers valued local antiquity. A newspaper that documents its district's inns, houses and personalities over 160 years becomes, inevitably, one of the principal sources for that district's history.

The Archant Years

In 2000 the Express was sold to Archant, the Norwich-based regional publisher whose London portfolio made it the paper's natural home for the next two decades. Under Archant the Ham & High operated alongside sister titles across north London, sharing resources while retaining its distinct editorial identity. The period brought the challenges common to all paid weeklies: falling print sales, the migration of advertising online, and pressure to build digital audiences without abandoning the printed paper that older readers prized.

Archant's stewardship also saw the Express continue its civic role in the area. In 2013 the paper helped organise a march in defence of Whittington Hospital, the Highgate hospital serving its patch, which was attended by 5,000 people. A local paper that can help mobilise thousands of residents on an issue of local health provision is exercising influence well beyond its circulation figure, and the Whittington campaign demonstrated the trust the Express still commanded a century and a half after its founding.

Newsroom Consolidation in North London

The economics of London weekly publishing tightened further in the late 2010s. Early in 2018 Archant closed its Finchley Road office, a base close to the paper's home territory, and in June 2018 it merged its north London news teams, bringing the Express's journalists together with those of sister titles. Consolidation of that kind was the industry's standard response to declining revenues, trading a dedicated office on the patch for the efficiencies of a shared newsroom.

For the Ham & High, whose authority rested on proximity to Hampstead and Highgate life, such changes carried an obvious risk. Yet the title's publication continued uninterrupted, and the merger of teams followed a pattern the paper had survived before in different forms. The essential compact, a Thursday paper written for two specific communities by journalists who knew them, remained the basis on which the Express was produced and sold.

Acquisition by Newsquest

In 2022 Archant was acquired by Newsquest, one of Britain's largest regional publishers, and the Hampstead and Highgate Express passed into Newsquest ownership, within a group whose ultimate parent is the USA Today Co. The change of owner was the paper's most significant since the Archant purchase of 2000, placing a fiercely local London title inside a portfolio of hundreds of newspapers across the United Kingdom and a parent company in the United States.

Group ownership on that scale brings shared digital platforms, national advertising arrangements and production systems that a single weekly could not sustain alone. Recent reference listings record the paper's headquarters at Queens House, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in central London, and its editor as Simon Murfitt. The geography of the modern operation, edited from a central London office rather than from Holly Mount, reflects the industry's transformation, but the product reaching readers each Thursday remains recognisably the paper founded in 1860.

Publication and Readership

The Express is a paid weekly, published on Thursdays, a publication day it has kept through changes of owner, format and office. Its circulation of 3,944 in 2021 places it among the smaller paid weeklies in London, but circulation comparisons mislead in an area of the Ham & High's character. Its readers include many of the people who run the institutions the paper covers, and its reporting is read in council offices, schools and amenity societies across Camden with an attention that titles many times its size might envy.

The paper's online presence, hamhigh.co.uk, extends that readership through the week, carrying news as it breaks on the patch alongside the content of the printed edition. The dual existence, weekly print institution and continuous digital service, is now the standard form of the British local paper. For the Express it means that a title founded to serve two Victorian villages now speaks to a global audience of former residents and Hampstead enthusiasts, while its core accountability remains to the streets of NW3 and N6.

The Express and Its Community

What has sustained the Ham & High since 1860 is the strength of the communities it serves. Hampstead and Highgate possess powerful senses of their own identity, active amenity societies and a long tradition of resisting unwelcome development, and they require a paper that reports planning, conservation and council affairs in forensic detail. The Express built its name on exactly that reporting. Its columns are where proposals are first scrutinised, where campaigns form, and where the area's public life is recorded for the archive.

The hospital campaign of 2013, the defence of the Heath across many decades, and the paper's coverage of the area's schools and cultural institutions all flow from the same source: a readership that expects its paper to be a participant in local life, not a spectator of it. Editors from George Jealous onwards understood that expectation, and the paper's longevity suggests their successors continued to meet it through every change of ownership and technology.

A Survivor of the London Press

London has lost most of the local newspapers founded in the nineteenth century. Borough papers that once competed on every high street have closed or merged beyond recognition, and even the capital's evening paper has passed through radical change. Against that background, the continued weekly publication of a title founded in 1860, under its historic name and for its original communities, is a notable survival. The Ham & High is not a revival or a successor brand; it is the same newspaper, continuously published since the reign of Queen Victoria.

Its history gathers up the main themes of British local journalism: the Victorian printer-editor who shaped a paper for thirty-five years and encouraged a future press baron; the literary suburb whose life the paper chronicled; the group ownership, office closures and digital reinvention of the modern era. Through all of it, the Express kept faith with the simplest of propositions, that Hampstead and Highgate deserve a paper of their own. On the evidence of more than 160 years, their readers have agreed.