"I think we're at the bottoming-out moment, where it's as bad as it gets and something new can be reborn from what remains."

Local newspapers are dying. Hundreds of once-proud titles are now clickbait merchants with no original reporting. Jim Waterson, the editor of London Centric, and Rachel Matthews, a journalism specialist at Liverpool John Moores University and the former news editor of the Gloucestershire Echo, talk about what it was like to work on a traditional local paper, why they failed and whether new kinds of reporting can emerge from the wreckage. The presenter is Ros Taylor.

I drew on a 2026 DCMS report on local news provision and local public service performance, a 2026 King's College London study on 'zombie' titles, Local news launches, closures and the state of play in 2025 by the Public Interest News Foundation and the 4 May 1995 edition of the Gloucestershire Echo, pages of which you can find at my Instagram and Substack. The editor of the Lymington Times speaks in a 1963 BBC documentary, The Life of a Local Newspaper, which includes clearly faked footage of a reporter attending a house fire.

Rachel was a consultant for the Preserving the Local Newspaper Archive project funded by The National Archives. She co-runs the Oral History Society Special History Group on Press and Journalism, which seeks to preserve people's past and current experiences of local and regional print journalism through oral history interviews.

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Getting old. It's better than the alternative, right? But the way Britons think about retirement and old age has changed enormously since the second world war. Some of us seize the chance to emigrate to sunnier places. Others find themselves living in a society with a tendency to regard the elderly as an asset-rich burden on the public finances.

Should the state pension age keep rising? Are politicians, many of whom never truly retire, the right people to order the rest of us to keep working for longer?

Ros Taylor talks to Helen McCarthy, Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History at the University of Cambridge. She is writing a social and cultural history of retirement since 1945, to be published by Penguin (Allen Lane). Her article on Brits retiring overseas is available to read.

The extract from Beveridge: The Problem of Old Age is at the Socialist Health Association.

Jeremy Seabrook wrote about old age for the Guardian in 2010. His books include A World Growing Old.

The Thames TV report about pensioner Dick is available on YouTube, as is the 1981 interview with Margaret Thatcher and a 1969 BBC documentary about retirees abroad.

I also drew on the Guardian's obituary of Kingsley Amis, Commons library briefings on pensions in the UK and the communication of state pension age increases for women born in the 1950s, Finishing the job: launching the Pensions Commission and the Institute of Fiscal Studies' history of state pensions,

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Hugely unpopular, the poll tax helped bring down Margaret Thatcher. But she had plenty of warnings. Why did the Tories press ahead anyway? Why do ageing lefties remember the protests with nostalgia? And what are the lessons for anyone who dares to try to reform property taxes?

Ros Taylor was talking to Tony Travers, the co-author of Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax and a Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics.

I also drew on The Poll Tax Rebellion in Haringey, a BBC Four interview with David Mellor, the Centre for Policy Studies' Of Dukes and Dustmen: Cautionary Rhymes on the Community Charge, CSpan footage of Prime Minister's Questions with Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock, BBC news reports of the riot, a 1997 edition of Newsnight, Poll tax is history in the Guardian, and a Warwick Economic research paper: The UK poll tax and the declining electoral roll: unintended consequences? by Jeremy Smith and Iain Maclean. The description by Colin of the poll tax riot is from Bollocks to the Poll Tax by Colin Revolting and was read by Ned Palmer.