Inspired by (read: a complete rip off of) 10,000 Words’ recent Nostalgia post on US news websites, we’ve put together our own UK version.

There was no way, with the great and patriotic event fast approaching, that one could simply do with linking to a post about American sites. They weren’t the only newspaper publishers to head out into the great frontier of the internet, we had our own Boones and Crocketts of the web, etc. etc.

Sadly, online journalism’s latest frontiersman has prevented the Wayback Machine from crawling his sites. And a few, like Mail Online, are only indexed back to about 2008, which is no fun because they look pretty much like they do today.

But here is a small selection, mostly from 2004, of the UK’s own pioneering efforts.

1. The Guardian, June 14 2004. Amazingly, the EU is still standing, despite facing the might of Robert Kilroy-Silk seven years ago.

2. The Telegraph, 8 June 2005. Back when Sienna Miller was simply Jude Law’s fiancee, not the person taking News International to the cleaners.

3. The Independent. I’m not sure what the date is on this page actually, but alongside all the hallmarks of 2004 news page design, the great big ad for the Libertines is doing its bit to make it look dated.

4. The Mirror, 8 June 2004. Back when Big Brother was big news, Sarah Harding was larking around with Calum Best, and a breakthrough in the Middle East was slightly less important than either.

5. The Financial Times. Again, not sure about the date here, but the lead story about commuter fares rising despite crap performance places it pretty squarely at any point between the inception of the web and today.

6. …and finally, it’s us. 1 July 2004. Not too much longer now and we will confine our current site to the Wayback Machine along with all the others. Keep your eyes peeled…

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