In the 1990 edited volume Investigating Victorian Journalism Michael Harris argued that the absence of London local newspapers' from most views of the Victorian press seriously distorts the general picture'. 1 His essay went on to describe some of the problems facing historians of the London local press, including the difficult subdivisions of London's political and community landscape and the loss of many of the publication records due to complex merger patterns. His complaint stands largely unanswered almost twenty years on, and the problems he identifies remain largely untackled. London's local history in general is under-researched, and newspapers are just one aspect of this; although some individual local studies have emerged since 1990 London local newspaper research has not kept up with the advances in other areas of newspaper history. Brake, Bell and Finkelstein's Nineteenth-