London Centric
Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, Cormac Kehoe, Olivia Facey (London Centric team),
London Centric is a reader-funded local news outlet conducting original, hard-hitting investigations into the powerful people who really run Britain’s capital city. It is edited by Jim Waterson, who was previously media editor at the Guardian and political editor at BuzzFeed. On this story Jim worked closely with staff journalist Polly Smythe, as well as reporters Cormac Kehoe and Olivia Facey, to knock on hundreds of doors across London and piece together London’s worst “mass eviction” in recent times.
Their shortlisted pieces were:
- The billionaire philanthropist making hundreds of Londoners homeless
- Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz’s mass evictions?
- The “Azizification” of London housing
London Centric’s entry was very well researched, the product of a great deal of work, but it was also extremely engaging: as a reader, you wanted to find out what was going on. It illustrated what is clearly a major problem in the rental sector, and how vulnerable people can be.
– Mel Young, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2026
