About

SE1 Community Newspaper

SE1 reported news other papers did not print. From 1975 to 1991 teams of volunteers wrote and produced SE1 for the south London neighbourhoods of Waterloo and North Southwark. The 147 issues tell the stories of people’s fights to improve housing conditions, protect jobs, strengthen local services and build a sense of history and community.

Visit the History page to find out more about SE1 and the radical media movements it was part of.

The SE1 community newspaper and photograph collection

The collection, held by Southwark Archives, includes every issue of the SE1 newspaper, plus a large number of photographs that were used or considered for publication.

Most of the newspapers were gathered by the Archives during SE1's publication years. Missing issues were added by members of SE1 Stories. The photos were found during an office clearance by Southwark Council in 2018.

SE1 Stories

We are an informal group of former volunteers who helped publish SE1, including some who helped get it going in 1975. A series of circumstances brought us together in 2019 to explore the collection at Southwark Archives.

We instantly saw its value and started to meet regularly as SE1 Stories group. The initial idea was just to help the archivists with categorising and captioning the thousands of images, but as we dived into the collection more, we started to think of ways to put these historical images to work in the local area today.

We created a number of projects. These include making a touring exhibition that connects community action initiatives in the 1970s and 80s with the grass roots activism in the same neighbourhoods today. A spin off from that was an online walking tour about the SE1 community newspaper and the stories it covered.

We also received a grant from Oxford Brookes University (acknowledged below) to have the newspapers and photos digitised. That support opened the door for us to make sites like this and encouraged us to keep on captioning and tagging the photo collection so that they are ready for the comprehensive online archive that Southwark Archives is developing.

There is more about these and other projects on our SE1 Stories website.

Help!

Did you once work on or read SE1? Do you have memories of meeting the deadlines as a volunteer or of the events the paper reported? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.

View the original newpapers and photos

The original newspapers are delicate but can be seen by appointment. The photos are available to view too. Contact Southwark Archives to make an appointment.

Site search

The PDF of each issue is searchable once open but there is no feature at this stage for searching the site as a whole.

More photos

Lambeth Archives hold a related set of photographs in their Blackfriars Photography Project (BPP) collection. The BPP was a community darkroom project based in Blackfriars Settlement from 1972 until it moved to the Beormund Community Centre in Bermondsey in about 1985 where it stayed until it closed in 1994.

Many of the photos in the SE1newspaper were taken by people working for or trained at the BPP, or who were using the project's equipment and facililites.

Thank you

The digitisation of the SE1 community newspaper collection was made possible by a grant from Spaces of Hope Project at Oxford Brookes University, led by Sue Brownill. AHRC Grant No AH/T00729X/1.