Henley Standard

The Henley Standard is the main local newspaper in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. It is published by the Higgs Group and is one of only a few privately owned local newspapers in the UK. It is the only newspaper dedicated entirely to Henley and the surrounding district.

The Standard covers Henley town and an area of south Oxfordshire as far as Watlington, Benson and Goring-on-Thames, as well as Pangbourne, Caversham, and Wargrave in Berkshire. The paper claims each edition is read by 35,000 people.[2] Its current owner is John Luker and the editor is Simon Bradshaw, who joined on 6 October 2008 from the London Evening Standard.[3]

The predecessor of the Henley Standard, first published in 1885, was The Henley Free Press. It became the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard in 1892. Its name was shortened in 1956 to the Henley Standard.[2]

The Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard was the first organ to publish works by the author George Orwell. These were poems that the author, under his real name of Eric Blair, wrote when he was 10 years old on the outbreak of war in 1914 and when he was 12 on the death of Lord Kitchener in 1916.