Station was crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations. At midnight on Sunday, London Live, the capital’s dedicated TV channel and crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations, will cease broadcasting after a little over a decade.
![[Jeremy Hunt pictured last year.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/19d9cb381d5756ae0c992b70bc34abead4caa1fc/1135_39_1438_1797/master/1438.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Back in 2010, the then Conservative culture secretary’s local TV plan was criticised as financially unviable by much of the media industry, but London was the exception. The licence for the capital was seen as the most lucrative to be awarded since Channel 5 in 1997. It was the subject of a hotly contested bidding battle won by Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent newspaper and the London Standard, formerly the Evening Standard.
A star-studded launch party in 2014 counted David Cameron, George Osborne, Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant, Naomi Campbell, Ralph Fiennes, Tracey Emin and Anna Friel among the guests. Hunt stood by his strategy, which was backed with up to £40m of funding from the BBC’s licence fee, criticising what he called the “Westminster media world’s” desire to write off the network as a “local yokel station” and argued the idea of one not being sustainable in London was “bonkers”.
However, for the now Lord Lebedev, the losses quickly mounted, at one point reaching more than £30m in total, and over the years London Live has been subjected to rounds of cuts and submissions to the media regulator Ofcom to water down its local content obligations.
