For its first century the paper was a Manchester institution, edited from 1872 to 1929 by C. P. Scott, whose name now anchors the trust that owns it. Scott was a Liberal MP, a friend of Chaim Weizmann, and the author of the 1921 editorial whose phrase "comment is free, but facts are sacred" became the paper's unofficial motto. When Scott's son John Russell Scott inherited the title in 1936, he gave it away. He transferred ownership to a new charitable foundation, the Scott Trust, charged with one purpose: "to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity." The trust still owns the paper. There is no proprietor to please, no family to inherit, no shareholders to placate with dividends. The model is rare enough in journalism that the Guardian remains, for better and for worse, an experiment in what a newspaper can be when nobody is making money from it.

It dropped "Manchester" from the masthead on 24 August 1959 and began printing in London in 1961. The move severed something. For more than a century the paper had been a regional voice with a national reach — supportive of Republican Spain (George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia that it was the only large English paper "that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty"), opposed to the Suez intervention in 1956, suspicious of Soviet trials and American McCarthyism in equal measure. London changed the readership and the politics. By the 1980s the Guardian was the paper of the British centre-left, broadly Labour-aligned but with a stubborn independent streak. It was the only major British paper not to back the Iraq invasion in 2003. Its sister Sunday paper The Observer, acquired in 1993, sometimes took a different line.

Two stories defined the modern Guardian. In 2011, reporter Nick Davies broke the news that the News of the World had hacked the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. The story brought down the country's biggest-selling Sunday paper and triggered the Leveson Inquiry into press standards. In June 2013, the paper began publishing material leaked by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor — including the existence of the surveillance program PRISM and the bulk collection of Verizon telephone records by the Obama administration. In July 2013, agents from Britain's GCHQ visited the Guardian's offices in King's Cross and supervised the physical destruction of hard drives containing Snowden material. The paper had already copied the files to The New York Times. The Guardian US edition won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage.

Through most of the 2000s and 2010s the Guardian lost roughly a hundred thousand pounds a day. The Scott Trust's endowment, built up from the sale of regional papers and online classifieds, was supposed to be perpetual — and yet by 2014 the paper was visibly burning through it. The 2014 launch of a membership scheme, which asks readers to pay voluntarily for content that remains free to read, has been the experiment that worked. By 2018 the paper had more than a million subscriptions or donations. By 2019 the news and media operations had broken even. The print edition, switched to tabloid format in 2018 and printed since then on Trinity Mirror presses, continues to decline; the website does not. The Guardian is now read in print by perhaps a hundred thousand people a day and online by more than twenty-three million UK adults a month.

Walk down York Way behind King's Cross station and you reach Kings Place, the canal-side office building the Guardian moved into in 2008. The building also houses a concert hall, two galleries, and the headquarters of several smaller arts organisations. The newsroom looks out over the Regent's Canal and the rail tracks of the East Coast Main Line. The Observer, after thirty-two years as the Guardian's Sunday sister, was sold to Tortoise Media in December 2024. The paper that began two centuries ago in a Manchester cotton merchant's office now produces editions for the UK, the United States, Australia, and Europe, and continues to publish from one of the most unusual ownership structures in global journalism — a trust whose only legal obligation is to keep the paper going.