What is the Charlton Champion?

The Charlton Champion is a local website for Charlton, south-east London.

It was founded in October 2010 as a response to poor local media coverage of events in Charlton, and to highlight issues in an area that’s frequently overlooked in favour of its larger neighbours.

Since then we’ve covered a wide range of stories, events and campaigns; broken news and – we hope – shone a bit of light on what goes on behind the scenes in local politics.

We’re here to celebrate what’s great about SE7, as well as discussing what’s not so great. We don’t usually cover crime, collisions or fires simply because others are better-placed to do that. But we do try to tell you what’s on, what’s happening, and what you can do to make this a better place. We’re not here to boost people’s house prices – we’re here to tell you things you didn’t know.

The site featured in a 2015 Carnegie Trust case study of community news providers; read the report here for more on why we launched and what we’ve learnt in the process. In August 2017, we joined the Independent Community News Network, which is based at Cardiff University – a grouping of community news providers from across the UK.

Contribute to the Charlton Champion

We’d love to hear from new contributors: if you’ve news, or strong views about anything in Charlton (if it’s SE7, it’s in) or its immediate surrounds – whether it be an event, a review, a campaign, praise, an idea, a gripe, or a piece of local history – please get in touch.

You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; or you can sign up to get each new post by email in the box on the right hand side of this page.

How can you help?

Firstly, you can help support the site by becoming a member – visit presspatron.com/charltonchampion.

But most importantly, we rely on our readers to spread the word. You can help us by:

– telling your SE7 friends and neighbours about the site
– contributing (see above!)
– sharing our posts on Twitter, Facebook or your social network of choice
– letting people know you found out about their event/service/campaign/story on the Charlton Champion.

It’s worth remembering this site is done in our spare time, so we don’t always have the time to go chasing up stories (and we can’t always respond to enquiries and comments as fast as we’d like) – the more you can tell us, the better!