The Londoner Paywall: How to Read The Londoner Articles for Free

The Londoner is the London news site and newsletter launched in 2025 by Jim Waterson, the former media editor of The Guardian. It covers the capital the way a good local paper used to, with reporting on councils, courts, licensing rows, housing and the odd corners of city life that the national press ignores. Its stories spread quickly on social media and in group chats, and a reader following one of those links often meets a message asking them to become a member. This guide explains how the membership works and how to read a full story.

How The Londoner paywall works

The Londoner runs on a membership model. The daily email newsletter is free, and some stories on the website are open to everyone. Other stories, including most of its investigations and follow-ups, are marked for members, and the body is replaced by a prompt to join when a non-member opens the page.

The gate is applied in the browser. The site delivers the complete story in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks for a member login and hides the text if there is none. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why this kind of gate can be read while a server-side paywall cannot.

Our tests on 15 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 409-word Londoner investigation into an east London licensing dispute loaded in full, all 6 paragraphs.
• A 384-word Londoner report on a sewage spill at Norwood Junction loaded in full, all 13 paragraphs.
• A 425-word Londoner follow-up on the closure of the Goldie Saloon loaded in full, all 9 paragraphs.
• A 665-word Londoner investigation into the homelessness charity Beam loaded in full, all 13 paragraphs.

The Londoner writes tightly, and those word counts are the whole piece, not a teaser. A short story from the site is short on the site too.

Read a Londoner article in full

• Copy the article link. The Londoner links look like the-londoner.co.uk/headline-slug/, with no date or section in the address.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

Other approaches

• The free newsletter. The Londoner's daily email carries its main stories and is free to anyone who signs up.
• Membership. A paid membership removes the gate on the website and supports the reporting directly.
• Private windows. They do not help here. The gate checks for a login rather than counting articles, so opening a members-only story in a private window still shows the prompt.

How it compares with other London coverage

The Londoner sits alongside the free Evening Standard and the Reach-owned MyLondon, neither of which has a paywall. Among the paywalled papers that cover London, The Times, The Independent and The i Paper all load in full through the reader. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Become a member if you read it regularly

The Londoner is a small independent newsroom with a handful of reporters, and it exists because its members pay for it. There is no owner subsidising losses and no advertising business behind it. If its stories about your borough, your council or your corner of the city are part of your week, a membership is the right way to keep that reporting going.