View From Weymouth and Portland
Overview
View From Weymouth and Portland was a free weekly newspaper serving Weymouth and the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England, published on Wednesdays as part of the View From series of hyper-local community newspapers. Under the series' shared branding it presented itself as Weymouth's very own free community newspaper, its masthead joining the resort town and the Portland community in a single edition, distributed free through supermarkets, leisure centres, stations and local shops on both sides of Portland Harbour. The title was created by journalist Philip Evans in the 2000s, was acquired by Tindle Newspapers in 2012, bought out of administration in 2017 and closed with the rest of the series in January 2018.
Trade listings of the series across its life sometimes counted Weymouth and Portland as two of the View From titles — the six papers Tindle acquired in 2012 were listed as Weymouth, Portland, Dorchester, Bridport, Beaminster and Lyme Regis — but the publisher's own distribution material presented a single combined edition for the two communities, its pickup points spanning Weymouth town centre and, across the harbour, Fortuneswell and the villages of Portland.
The Towns It Served
Weymouth is a seaside town on the Dorset coast, formed from two settlements, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, on either side of the River Wey, whose union was formalised by Act of Parliament in 1571. It is regarded as arguably England's original seaside resort: the Duke of Gloucester built Gloucester Lodge on the seafront, and King George III made Weymouth his summer holiday residence on fourteen occasions between 1789 and 1805, bathing in the sea from a bathing machine and transforming the town's fortunes; his painted statue, erected in 1810, still stands on the esplanade among the Georgian seafront architecture. The railway arrived in 1857 and turned the genteel health resort into a family holiday town. The town was also a great embarkation port: tens of thousands of troops, mostly American, departed from Weymouth for the Normandy landings in 1944, and Portland Harbour, completed in the Victorian era, became an established naval base.
The Isle of Portland, joined to the mainland by Chesil Beach and a road bridge, is famous above all for Portland stone, the white limestone quarried there for centuries and used, under Sir Christopher Wren's direction of the quarries, in the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral. Wren was Member of Parliament for Weymouth in 1702, a neat emblem of the two communities' intertwined history. A single newspaper edition serving both the resort and the island was a natural product for a publisher whose model was built on tight, well-defined local patches.
The View From Series
The View From titles were built up from scratch by Philip Evans after he left Pulman's Weekly News, the Tindle-owned weekly in Axminster. His formula was a free weekly for each town, published on Wednesdays, supported by local advertising and distributed through a dense network of free pickup points, with shared production holding down costs. By the end of the 2000s the weekly View From titles in Weymouth, Dorchester, Bridport, Beaminster and Lyme Regis had a combined distribution of 23,000 copies, alongside a monthly paper in the Sid Vale and publishing rights in Chard and Ilminster.
The publisher's distribution leaflet maps the Weymouth and Portland edition in detail. In Weymouth, copies could be picked up at Asda and Morrisons, at the Borough Council, the Community Hospital, the Pavilion, Redlands Leisure Centre, the railway station, the library, the Heritage Centre, estate agents and food stores, and at outlets in Overcombe and Lynch Lane. On Portland, pickup points included Community 2000, S Fowler Newsagent, Premier Stores and Travis Perkins, and at Fortuneswell the Compass Point — a spread that took the edition from the esplanade hotels to the island's main village centre. Surviving archived issues show the title in full production in the Tindle period, including an issue dated Wednesday 25 December 2013 carrying its property section under the series' viewfromonline.co.uk website.
Competition on the Patch
Weymouth was the power base of the series' principal rival. The Dorset Echo, Newsquest's daily newspaper for the county, is produced in Weymouth, and Newsquest's west Dorset weeklies — the Bridport and Lyme Regis News among them — were also operated from the Echo's Weymouth office. The same office ran the Dorset operation that the View From papers competed against for local advertising across west Dorset. Within Weymouth itself, the free View From edition offered advertisers a single-community alternative to the county daily and its weekly stablemates, in a town whose economy of tourism, retail and public services generated the kind of local advertising the freesheet model depended on.
Rescue and the Tindle Acquisition
The View From group's Dorset titles came close to closure at the end of 2009, when talks were held to save twenty-five jobs. In January 2010 Evans announced their acquisition by an unnamed businessman from St Albans with a publishing company in Hertfordshire and business interests in Dorset, noting that some staff had offered to work for nothing to save the business. The titles continued under Lyme Media & Events of Lyme Regis.
Tindle Newspapers, which had bought four of Evans' View From titles in 2009 and held a majority stake in View From Publishing Ltd, completed the series' reunification in April 2012, acquiring the six View From titles — Weymouth, Portland, Dorchester, Bridport, Beaminster and Lyme Regis — from Lyme Media & Events, plus the Weekender titles in Crewkerne, Chard and Ilminster. All full-time staff at the Axminster and Lyme Regis centres were retained; Philip Evans became managing director of the combined operation; and the papers were published by Devon, Dorset and Somerset Series of Newspapers Ltd. Sir Ray Tindle said the titles fitted his group's ethos of hyper-local publications and had a strong readership and loyal advertising base.
Administration and Closure
In July 2017 the View From titles were bought out of administration by Peter Masters, chairman of Truro City Football Club, who had already rescued the Liskeard-based Sunday Independent that year. A spokesman for his company explained that they had agreed to continue publishing the loss-making titles for six months to give continued employment to staff, but that, in the light of continued falling revenues, the titles were no longer sustainable.
The series ceased publication in the first week of January 2018, with around twenty jobs lost. HoldtheFrontPage's closure report listed the affected titles as the View From papers based in Beaminster, Bridport, Dorchester, Lyme Regis, Weymouth, Seaton, Honiton and South Somerset, together with Pulman's Weekly News. Later reporting put the total redundancies across the closure at twenty-six. The Weymouth and Portland edition ended with the series, leaving the Newsquest daily and weeklies once more in sole possession of the patch.
Aftermath
The closure prompted an attempt to buy the View From titles into community ownership. Duncan Williams, a commercial development consultant with News Group Ltd and operator of the Poole Post marketing service, launched a crowdfunding campaign seeking £85,000 by 3 March 2018, arguing that local newspapers were the voice of their communities and that the loss left a whole county dominated by the American-owned Newsquest. The campaign did not revive the papers. Williams later bought the View From company for £1 and, following a lengthy legal battle, was found liable rather than Masters for money owed to the staff made redundant in the closure. In Bridport a successor monthly, the Bridport Times, appeared within days; no direct successor to the Weymouth and Portland edition was launched.
Legacy
View From Weymouth and Portland was the seaside expression of the View From idea: one free weekly, researched and sold street by street, for a resort and an island community that a county daily treated as part of a much bigger map. Its combined patch — esplanade and harbour, naval history and quarry villages — gave it one of the most distinctive territories in the series, and its disappearance in January 2018 ended more than a decade in which Weymouth and Portland had a community newspaper of their own alongside the county titles published in the town.
