Three regional publishers have formed a partnership to bid to run a local TV channel in London, it has emerged.

Archant and Tindle have been revealed as the main owners of LondonTV, a consortium led by former Trinity Mirror executive Richard Horwood which has bid for the London local TV licence.

Trinity Mirror has also joined the partnership in a deal which could see journalists in the three publishers’ newsrooms involved in news stories for the channel.

Ofcom has today released further details of the 57 bids to run local TV in 21 cities across the UK, which comes after Archant also submitted an application to run a TV channel in Norwich called Mustard.

And it has emerged that former Sheffield Star editor Alan Powell, who stepped down two years ago, is behind one of the bids to run a TV channel in the city.

The channel would be part of YourTV, which is chaired by former BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons and has submitted bids for local TV in a number of cities, with Alan being chairman of the Sheffield board.

In London, there have been five bids to run the TV channel, with a decision on successful applications due to be made later this year.

According to the LondonTV application, Archant and Tindle each hold a 37.5pc stake in the business, along with “some of the country’s top broadcast TV professionals”, who have not been named.

The application states: “In partnership with London’s local newspapers, LondonTV will provide a new voice for London. With our own dedicated team of multi-skilled professional video journalists, we will have the support of the many local newspaper newsrooms around the Capital.

“We’re not proposing to put the local papers on TV, but we will draw on their huge pool of genuinely local news stories, sometimes for coverage of breaking news, and sometimes for in-depth local features leveraging the reporting done by the hundreds of journalists employed by Archant’s, Tindle’s and Trinity Mirror’s scores of local newspapers, magazines and websites reaching right across London.

“Our local newspaper and online partners are a unique and deep local resource not available to any other London bidder, but our programmes will primarily be made by TV professionals.

“In this way LondonTV will provide Londoners with the most comprehensive broadcast quality news coverage ever achieved, and something very different from existing regional TV news.”

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt wants the first new local TV stations up and running by 2015 and is due to award the first licences this autumn.