The story begins with a bankruptcy. In the early 2000s, a group of friends were working at Adrenalin, a British adventure sports and lifestyle magazine, when its publisher went under. Among them was Danny Miller, a designer who had produced something called "Little White Lies: Issue Zero" as his student degree project. With no jobs and nothing to lose, the group decided to turn Miller's academic exercise into a real publication. In 2005, alongside co-founder Matt Bochenski, they launched Little White Lies — a bi-monthly film magazine unlike anything on the shelf.
David Jenkins, who would become the magazine's longtime editor, was a journalism student at London's City University when he received an email from the founders looking for contributors. He jumped at the opportunity. There was, as he later described it, a punk ethos about the whole enterprise — the sense that you could start a print magazine without thinking you were riding into the furnace. Two decades later, Jenkins is still there, and the magazine has published over a hundred issues from its headquarters at Zetland House on Clifton Street in London's Shoreditch.
What made Little White Lies immediately distinctive was its commitment to illustration over photography. Each issue is visually redesigned around its cover film: the typefaces change, the editorial icons shift, the chapter headings transform, the colour palette rotates — but the underlying template stays the same. The result is a magazine that feels both consistent and perpetually new. The Guardian called it the best-designed film magazine on the shelf. The reviews use a tripartite ranking system — anticipation, enjoyment, and in retrospect — that captures the movie-going experience as something more than a thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict.
Published by TCO London, the same independent house behind huck and Sandwich Magazine, Little White Lies has grown into Europe's largest independent film publication. Its motto — "Truth & Movies" — signals an editorial stance that is affirmative without being uncritical, enthusiastic without being breathless. The magazine avoids gossip and academic pretension in equal measure, preferring accessible, deeply felt writing about why cinema matters. That it rose from the wreckage of an adventure sports title and a student project makes its longevity all the more improbable — and all the more proof that the best magazines begin not with a business plan but with a group of friends who refuse to stop making things.
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