About

This site is the free, public face of The Elmbridge Record: the stories and updates drawn from a much larger civic archive tracking planning applications, council decisions, FOI disclosures and council minutes across Elmbridge.

Elmbridge has no dedicated local news outlet. What coverage exists comes from national groups reporting on Surrey as a whole, with little time or resource left for the detail that actually affects this borough: what's being built, what the council decided and why, what residents asked for under Freedom of Information and what they got back. Elmbridge Borough Council is also being abolished in April 2027, replaced by the new East Surrey Council. Few organisations are watching that transition closely. We are.

Here, you'll find articles written from what the archive turns up: planning decisions worth knowing about, council business explained in plain terms, and updates on the borough's move to East Surrey Council. Subscribe below and they'll land in your inbox, no charge.

Where the archive comes in

The articles here are drawn from something bigger. The Elmbridge Record archive collects every planning application, decision, FOI disclosure and set of council minutes automatically, and makes them searchable in one place, with tools built to help you understand what you're looking at.

That's where you can look up a specific planning application on your street, track a committee's decisions over time, or draft a well-informed FOI request in minutes rather than hours.

The archive is free to search. Full access to the writing and analysis tools, alerts and document features runs from £2.50 a month.

Who we are

The Elmbridge Record is built and run by Nick Mann and Warren Mauger, founders of The Quarry, an independent, reader-funded news outlet in Guernsey, Channel Islands, operating since summer 2025.

Nick has spent more than two decades working at the coalface of local journalism in print and online. He has spent the last two years building the technology behind The Quarry's products, including this one.

Warren worked in local news before founding a video production company which he has run for more than two decades.

We built our independent local news model in Guernsey first. Elmbridge is our first attempt to bring it to a UK news desert. If membership revenue supports it, we want to fund a journalist here who can do what no archive can: attend meetings, build sources, and tell the stories The Record points toward.

If you're interested, please get in touch by emailing: editor@thequarry.media.

Until then, the archive and the tools are open to anyone who wants to do that work themselves.