A copy of the last-ever Evening Standard on a pub table in Holborn a few hours ago. Next week a new, Thursday-only publication will appear in its place, ending almost 200 years of a daily newspaper designed to let busy Londoners know what's been happening in the city whilst we were hard at work at our desks, counters and building sites. Appropriately I had to wait for a man carrying an anatomical skeleton to step off my tube home this evening. Whether he knew it was the end of an era, I don't know, but it is.
"Star, News and Standard!" remembers my mum from her days as a London office girl in the early 60s. By the time I started work in the capital only the last of those three evening papers had survived, so I guess its name was well chosen.
Over the decades that followed I joined hundreds of thousands of commuters handing over my 20/30/50 pence each day after work to the nearest vendor standing in their kiosk or behind wooden box to get my fill of news, starting with the famous Stop Press panel run across the bottom of the back page, the column- counter intuitively - running perpendicular to the rest of the paper.
Of course there was no other way of getting news then unless you access to a radio or tv or your other half called you, even if the very idea of such a paper as I describe above ever being necessary no doubt seems quaint or even absurd when encountered by Gen Z.
But it was and it worked, so much so that three or four editions each day were often sent out, from an early one you might pick up from mainline termini at 11am to the coveted West End Final rushed out just around the time of the early evening news on tv. With their smeary ink, rough cut pages - both presumably a function of the speed of production but often looking as though children had had a hand in making it - and huge, screaming headlines it really WAS London.
Actually in later years I was, to be fair, only buying it for the monthly – yes, monthly – pleasure of the ES Magazine, then a slick, perfect-bound supplement as likely to feature proper and occasionally investigative journalism as it was to carry a fashion shoot or style piece. It was easily the equal of the Sundays. Recently, under the editorship of Dylan Jones, the paper itself has been very much on the down, with a reduced page count, bizarre use of the front cover to introduce the one main story and rather sad diminution of it as a Tuesday-to-Thursday affair only. And yes, the reasons are obvious – by chance, I wrote this entire piece (save these last two paragraphs) on my phone, typos and all, on the way home.
But when the TfL cleaners stuff the remaining copies of today’s last edition into their bin liners in the depots tonight, be very certain that something will have changed.
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