Happy birthday to us

The clown's booked, the balloons are up, the canapés have been daintily arranged. Yes, the day is finally here: The Londoner has reached the big old age of one! That means a whole 365 days of thrilling, fascinating and sometimes exhausting reporting, sending our journalists everywhere from Soho to Southall, Mayfair to Morden. In honour of this, below you'll find a few stories from both me (Hannah) and Andrew that we're particularly glad to have published.

More than anything, I feel extremely proud of what we've achieved. Our aim was always a grand one: to make you feel, in the time you spend with us, that you’ve been transported. Whether you’re on the tube commuting in the morning, sitting at your desk in the office, or looking at your emails at your kitchen table, we want to take you to the parts of London you never knew existed — be it a crime scene, a migrant’s flat, an art fair, a court room, a mansion — and to introduce you to people you've never met. Through in-depth, high-quality investigations, features and dispatches, we've endeavoured to give you a front row seat to the stories and characters that really matter in the capital, all told with our trademark rigour and humanity.

I'll be honest; it's been difficult at times. It's taken blood, sweat and tears (and quite a lot of extremely complex legal wrangling) to get us here. There have been moments where I've wondered if the entire thing was sheer madness. But the results speak for themselves. After our first piece on MP Jas Athwal, the prime minister was forced to speak about the findings of our investigation. Our article on the penguins trapped underground at the London Aquarium led to a celeb-fronted campaign to free them. Our reporting has saved pubs from closure by developers — or, in the case of the Sekforde in Clerkenwell, mobilised an outpouring of local support in the face of spurious noise complaints.

This is proper, old-fashioned public service journalism. It's costly and difficult, and it takes a huge amount of effort. But it gets results that change the city for the better, that hold the powerful to account. We think London deserves it. And we're glad that you do too. So here's to The Londoner's first birthday — and here's to many more.

Hannah's picks

1. Noise complaints are killing London’s pubs — Andrew Kersley
   There are many Andrew articles I could choose (a close second was his piece on the implosion of east London's radical bookshop, written with Jack Walton, and a third his legendary exploration of Shrek's Adventure). I've chosen this piece, on the impact that noise complaints are having on the capital's nightlife, because it encapsulates the unique way in which The Londoner can combine the micro and the macro, pairing detailed personal testimony with a big-picture understanding of the situation for incredible effect. It's a perfect fusion of on-the-ground investigative reporting, data analysis work and evocative scene writing — a combination that's become The Londoner's hallmark.
2. “My event is the only one that fucks”: inside London’s hot new literary scenes — James Greig
   As an editor, I make a lot of commissions based on what I'd personally like to read. These literary nights had been cropping up throughout London and had become a constant source of debate between my friends, yet I hadn't read anything that really delved into the phenomenon. This dispatch rectified that. It's beautifully written, interested in its characters and genuinely hilarious — a rare triple whammy. Shortly after it was published, there was a flood of articles about the scene. Yet, in my opinion, there's none that come close to capturing the lightning in a bottle of this first piece (and none that inspired such a vociferous Instagram Stories discourse).
3. £250k salaries and two kilos of caviar: Inside London’s new media arms race — Joshi Herrmann
   There's an old adage that there's nothing people in the media love reading about more is gossip about other people in the media. While this isn't untrue, I'm certain this piece on the growing feud between Rupert Murdoch and Paul Marshall — and by extension the old and new barons of Fleet Street — is a riot no matter your proximity to the finer workings of the city's newspapers. To me, this article demonstrates our ability to tell fun, gossipy and revelatory stories in a way nobody else can, as well as cast our shrewd journalistic eye over our peers. Come for the caviar, stay for the cattiness (sample quote: “Marshall is so desperate to be invited to the dinner parties that he paid twice what it was worth”).
4. The day the right took London — Peter Carlyon
   This article was a spur-of-the-moment decision. A few hours before the protest began, I messaged Peter, the journalist who wrote the piece, and asked him whether he was free, and whether he'd like to get in the thick of an increasingly belligerent crowd (a situation where people don't tend to take kindly to reporters). Luckily for me, he agreed. What resulted is the kind of writing I think The Londoner excels at, and which it's so hard to find elsewhere: a truly human piece of journalism that's fuelled by rich, detailed action scenes and fully realised characters.
5. The dying of the light — Hannah Williams
   This is one of my favourite pieces I've published in my entire career. The topic of changing light in cities was something I'd been thinking about for ages (and had been banging on about to anybody who would listen), and I was so excited to combine reporting and historical research to finally craft the feature I'd been long imagining. Going around with lamplighter Aaron in his van really did feel like a curtain on the city had been lifted, and as a journalist it's always a privilege to show the reader what's underneath. It's stuck with me, too; I always stop and admire the gas lamps near The Londoner's office. Plus, the photography from Harry Mitchell is beautiful.

Andrew's picks

1. Meet London’s earlybirds — Kath Swindells
   It's so rare to get an actual glimpse into the lives of ordinary people working in frontline jobs. The kind of feature reporting that really humanises its subjects often tends to be focused on those at the top of the pyramid — celebrities, business people, politicians — rather than the countless people who keep the whole thing together. To do that, while perfectly interweaving those human vignettes with fascinating and exclusive data about the nature of the people using our city’s bus network, felt like the kind of storytelling only somewhere like The Londoner would be able to do. 
2. Exclusive: Labour MP Jas Athwal is the landlord of a failing children’s home — Andrew Kersley
   It’d be hard to compile a list of our favourite articles without including the one that started it all. It took weeks of work to expose the shady web that linked Labour MP Athwal to, first, a failing children’s home where kids had been stabbed, and second the man behind that home, his friend Daljit Johal. When the exposé came out it spread across the local and national press. Not many new outlets can claim on their first day that their launch day exposé was discussed by the prime minister!
3. No laughing matter: Why didn’t a top Soho comedy club pay its performers? — Rachel Healy
   London is the heart of so many creative industries, but most of the coverage of that sector are glowing reviews or profiles placed by agents or public relations firms. Really, deep investigative reporting into the worst offenders in those sectors almost never happens. It’s a pleasure to be working for somewhere that publishes that kind of journalism — case in point being Rachel Healy’s great expose on 21Soho and the man behind it, Nick Mills, who had left dozens of staff, suppliers and comedians out of pocket. Maybe the biggest testament to this piece’s importance is that it recently led to Healy getting shortlisted for a British Journalism Award.
4. Exclusive: The billionaire developer closing London’s pubs —Andrew Kersley
   Following on from a tip, I spent weeks painstakingly connecting a web of offshore companies linked to Asif Aziz to dozens of now shuttered pubs across London, and trying to get answers from Aziz and his companies about what had gone on. In London figures like Aziz thrive by operating in the shadows. Using the veil of overseas companies and an opaque land registry, they ensure no-one can join the dots on their empire, even as their decisions invisibly, and increasingly, shape our everyday lives in this city, all to their benefit. 
5. The lonely death of Dr Jagdip Sidhu — Andrew Kersley
   For every journalist, there’s a story you lose yourself to a little bit. For me, this was that piece. I spent two weeks speaking to Amandip Sidhu, and enveloping myself in the life and final weeks of his brother, Dr Jagdip Sidhu, who died by suicide, in an effort to document the growing crisis of suicides by doctors and nurses in the NHS. The end result was an exploration of both a deeply personal tragedy and a national problem that has no easy answers.