Look for a compact brick-and-glass building with a plain rectangular frontage and a fixed B-B-C sign marking the entrance.
This is B-B-C, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Wiltshire, broadcasting from Prospect Place and sending Swindon and the wider county a steady stream of news, sport, conversation, and the occasional spirited opinion about local life. In other words, the sort of thing people insist they never listen to... right before quoting it word for word.
The station began here on the fourth of April, nineteen eighty-nine, but not under its current name. It launched as B-B-C Wiltshire Sound because its commercial rival, G-W-R, owned the trademark for the words “Wiltshire” and “Radio” used together. Radio history can be gloriously petty. The first voice listeners heard belonged to Paul Chantler, and the early logo borrowed one of Wiltshire’s proudest symbols, the Westbury White Horse.
From the start, the station built its reputation on solid local programming. Under programme editor Mike Gray in the early nineteen nineties, it took some lively chances too. He gave a seventeen-year-old Swindon student named Mark Franklin his own shows; that led to Franklin being spotted and hired for Top of the Pops, which is not a bad career jump for a local presenter. Another specialist voice came from jazz singer Rosemary Squires.
Then there was Acrebury, the station’s long-running radio soap. Presenter and actor Gerry Hughes voiced every single character himself and earned a Guinness World Record for doing it. That is either heroic versatility or a sign nobody in the building escaped quickly enough. Salisbury even got its own breakfast show for a while, simply because it sits far enough from Swindon to feel like its own radio world.
In two thousand, the station relaunched. Acrebury disappeared, the Salisbury breakfast show went too, and some presenters left. Listeners were unhappy enough to protest outside these headquarters, and the local paper had a field day. The relaunch also gave Swindon separate programmes from the rest of the county, reflecting the town’s rapid growth and new unitary authority status, meaning Swindon now ran its own local council services rather than sharing them at county level.
The app image shows that awkward middle chapter in two thousand and six, when the service carried a split identity as B-B-C Radio Swindon and B-B-C Radio Wiltshire before the two strands reunited. In two thousand and eight the station became simply B-B-C Wiltshire, then in twenty twenty it reverted to B-B-C Radio Wiltshire again, partly because the new jingle package needed a name that fit. Broadcasting, as ever, runs on both public service and practicalities.
Today, the sound from this building still travels widely: on F-M, D-A-B, Freeview, and B-B-C Sounds. By December twenty twenty-three, the official audience body R-A-J-A-R counted eighty-nine thousand weekly listeners, with a six point two percent share.
For all the renaming and reshuffling, this place still does one very old job: it helps a county hear itself.
When you are ready, continue to Apsley House for a very different kind of local story.
