About West Sussex Gazette

West Sussex Gazette

The West Sussex Gazette is a weekly county newspaper based at Arundel in West Sussex, founded in 1853 by the printer T. H. Mitchell of the town's High Street. It claims the distinction of being the oldest newspaper in West Sussex, and for most of its life it was also one of the county's two principal papers. Beginning as a monthly advertiser, it grew into a weekly of remarkable reach: in 1903 it claimed the largest circulation of any provincial newspaper in southern England. In the twenty-first century it became equally notable for what it refused to change, remaining one of the few broadsheet newspapers left in Britain.

The Gazette's story is one of a small town producing an outsized newspaper. Arundel was never a large place, yet the Mitchell family's paper, printed first in the High Street and later in works behind Tarrant Street, served an entire county. That achievement, and the archive of more than 63,000 pages the paper left in its first 152 years, mark the Gazette as one of the significant titles of the English provincial press.

Founded by the Mitchells in 1853

The paper was founded in 1853 by T. H. Mitchell, a printer with premises in the High Street at Arundel. Mitchell had been established in the town's book and printing trade for years, recorded as a bookseller and stationer in 1830 and as a printer by 1842. His son, W. W. Mitchell, acted as editor and publisher of the new venture, and later became mayor of Arundel, an illustration of the civic standing a successful newspaper proprietor could attain in a small borough. The family firm continued as jobbing printers in the town long after the newspaper itself had grown beyond local printing.

The paper's first form was modest: a monthly advertiser, issued under a title that included Mitchell's name and described itself as a market and railway intelligencer for West Sussex. The formula combined local advertising with the practical information a market and railway age demanded. From those beginnings it was soon renamed the West Sussex Advertiser, shedding the proprietor's name as the paper's identity became larger than the family business that had created it.

From Advertiser to Gazette

The title evolved in stages that trace the paper's growing ambition. After its launch as a monthly advertiser in 1853, it became the West Sussex Advertiser, and from the following year appeared weekly as the West Sussex Advertiser and South Coast Journal. Only later did it settle into its enduring form, the West Sussex Gazette and County Advertiser, before the name was shortened to the West Sussex Gazette by which it is known today.

The earliest archived issue dates from 1 September 1853, and the preserved run is extensive. Findmypast records 5,007 issues comprising 63,152 pages across the paper's incarnations, from the West Sussex Advertiser of 1853 to 1855 through the West Sussex Gazette from 1855 to 2005. Weekly publication sustained over a century and a half produced that archive organically: market reports, assize and council coverage, sporting results and family announcements accumulated into the fullest single record of West Sussex life in the period.

A County Paper from a Small Town

The Gazette was always a county newspaper rather than a town one. Arundel provided its base, its printing works and its name in the public mind, but its readers were spread across West Sussex, in market towns, villages and farming country from the coast to the Downs and the Surrey border. Serving a whole county from a small borough required an extensive network of local correspondents and agents, and the paper's success in building one explains its unusual circulation strength.

Printing became one of Arundel's two chief industries in the nineteenth century, alongside brewing, largely because of the Gazette. By 1884 the trade the Mitchells had built was central to the town's economy. A purpose-built printing works followed in 1906, behind Tarrant Street, with an ornate facade designed by the same architects responsible for other of the paper's premises. The building stands as physical evidence of the scale the Gazette had reached: a county institution with industrial premises of its own, in a town of a few thousand people.

The 1903 Circulation Claim

The most striking claim in the Gazette's history dates from 1903, when the paper asserted that it had the largest circulation of any provincial newspaper in southern England. Whether or not every rival would have conceded the point, the claim itself reveals the paper's standing at the height of the provincial press. Fifty years after its founding as a monthly advertiser, the West Sussex Gazette presented itself, credibly enough to print the boast, as the biggest paper of its kind across the south.

That strength rested on the completeness of its county coverage. A farmer, trader or professional family in West Sussex in 1903 who wanted the markets, the county news and the advertisements of local commerce in one weekly paper had a clear choice. The Gazette's dominance also reflected the Mitchell model perfected: own the printing, know the territory, and make the paper indispensable to the commercial and civic life of the whole county rather than a single town.

Ownership in the Modern Era

The independent era ended as it did for most British weeklies. By 1995 the Gazette's offices were still in Arundel but the paper was no longer printed there, and ownership had passed to Portsmouth and Sunderland Newspapers. The separation of the editorial base from the printing works marked the end of the vertically integrated model the Mitchells had built, in which a paper's identity and its manufacture occupied the same streets.

Later the Gazette became part of Johnston Press, and following that group's collapse and restructuring its titles passed to National World. Group ownership brought the Gazette into national portfolios, with production, digital publishing and management shared across many titles. Through those changes the paper retained its Arundel identity and its county remit, which remained the qualities that distinguished it within any portfolio: the oldest newspaper in West Sussex, still published for the county whose name it bears.

The Broadsheet That Stayed a Broadsheet

By the twenty-first century the Gazette had acquired a second distinction: it was one of the few remaining broadsheet newspapers in the country. While title after title converted to tabloid or compact formats, the West Sussex Gazette retained the large page. When Johnston Press relaunched the paper in February 2013 as part of its national programme of redesigns, the Gazette deliberately kept its broadsheet format, while adding new features and columnists, increasing its pages and moving to better quality paper to improve the reproduction of photographs.

Editor-in-chief Gary Shipton presented the 2013 changes as an evolution rather than a revolution, telling readers that the relaunch would build on the paper's renowned strengths without doing anything radical. The relaunch introduced new countryside and village features and invited amateur photographers to submit pictures of the county. The approach suited the Gazette's character exactly: a paper whose readers valued continuity was modernised in content while its familiar physical form, the broadsheet sheet Sussex readers had unfolded since the nineteenth century, was preserved intact.

Coverage of County Life

The Gazette's content reflected its county brief. Agriculture, markets and rural affairs stood at its centre, serving a readership for whom farming was both livelihood and culture. Village news, gathered through correspondents, gave small communities a printed presence they could find nowhere else. Over generations, that coverage made the paper the natural home for the announcements, reports and disputes through which West Sussex understood itself.

The historical value of such coverage grows with time. Because the Gazette reported the ordinary business of the county so thoroughly for so long, its pages now serve historians of agriculture, transport, local government and family life as a primary source. The 63,152 pages preserved for the years to 2005 represent not a selection of highlights but the whole weekly record, advertisements and all, and it is the completeness of that record that gives a county paper its lasting importance.

Rivals and the County Press Landscape

The Gazette did not hold its field unchallenged. In the nineteenth century a rival, The News of Littlehampton and Arundel, with its accompanying guide and visitors' journal titles, was published in both towns from 1869 into the 1880s or later. Such competition was healthy for readers and typical of the period, when even modest towns could support competing sheets. The Gazette outlasted its local rivals and, by 1995, stood as one of the two chief newspapers of West Sussex, a position it had effectively held for a century.

Survival on that scale required the paper to adapt repeatedly: from monthly to weekly, from advertiser to full newspaper, from family ownership to group ownership, and from letterpress printing in Arundel to production elsewhere. Each change removed something of the original Mitchell enterprise, but the county readership that was the paper's foundation remained, and successive owners recognised that the Gazette's name and territory were assets worth preserving.

The Gazette's Legacy

The West Sussex Gazette's legacy rests on three foundations: its age, as the oldest newspaper in its county; its reach, as the small-town paper that claimed southern England's largest provincial circulation in 1903; and its archive, the tens of thousands of pages in which West Sussex's modern history is recorded week by week. Together they explain why the Victoria County History's account of Arundel treats the paper's premises and history as features of the town's own story.

Founded by a High Street printer and his son in 1853, still published as a broadsheet county weekly in the digital age, the Gazette demonstrates how far a well-judged local newspaper could go. It began as a monthly advertiser for a market town and became, for generations of Sussex readers, simply the county paper. That transformation, achieved without ever leaving Arundel as its home, is the measure of the Mitchells' founding insight and of the institution their successors maintained.