Exchange and Mart published weekly from 1868 until February 2009. A hundred and forty-one years, from a converted potato warehouse in Covent Garden to a final circulation of 21,754 copies. The tagline survived every owner: "From an autograph to an orchid, a toy to a typewriter, find it in Exchange & Mart."

The economics shaped the language. You paid by the word, so you compressed. GCH meant gas central heating. ONO, or nearest offer. VGC, very good condition. Paul Bruthiaux's 1996 study for Oxford University Press compared the register to pidgin languages: structural simplification driven by transactional necessity. But something else happened inside that compression. Anthony Whitehead, writing in The Spectator, noticed that readers "imagine the people behind them and even construct little lives for them in our heads." You didn't read a classified ad. You decoded it.

Loot arrived in 1985 because David Landau, an Oxford don, picked up a free-ads magazine called Secondamano at Milan airport and thought it was about antiques. It wasn't. He launched Loot: London's Noticeboard on pink paper, same shade as the Financial Times, with a fifty-word limit per ad. By 1994 it printed twenty regional editions, 180,000 copies weekly. The Personal Messages column generated its own subculture: pen names, social events called "Loot Nights Out." A community built entirely from compressed needs.

George Orwell understood the mechanism. In 1939 he wrote that papers like Exchange and Mart "reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with a circulation of millions cannot possibly do." He was right. The classified column was a neighbourhood's desires reduced to their barest economic expression. Guitar teachers who couldn't afford display ads. Seamstresses offering alterations. Someone selling a wardrobe because they were moving, or divorcing, or dying, though the ad would only say "wardrobe, pine, good condition, buyer collects."

The money tells the rest. UK regional media revenue fell from £2.4 billion in 2007 to roughly £590 million by 2022. News media's share of advertising dropped from 39% to 6%. Rightmove, Indeed, Autotrader: each a surgical extraction of a classified category that had sustained local journalism for over a century.

What the internet removed wasn't the ads. It was the constraint that made them a form. When Loot's fifty-word limit disappeared into Gumtree's unlimited text fields, the compression evaporated, and with it the imaginative work. A Gumtree listing tells you everything about a wardrobe and nothing about the person selling it. The classified ad, by economic necessity, told you almost nothing about the object and something inadvertent about the life behind it.

Nobody browses Gumtree on a Thursday morning with a cup of tea, scanning for patterns in strangers' wants.

Sources: