The Last Broadcast

When the town of Hensford’s local radio station closed, most people assumed its story had ended. The station had started in 1984 in two rooms above a bakery and, for nearly forty years, had broadcast everything from football commentary to interviews with visiting musicians. When falling advertising income finally forced it off air, the building was sold within weeks. The equipment disappeared almost as quickly. What remained was less obvious: hundreds of boxes of cassette tapes, handwritten programme notes and photographs that nobody seemed to know what to do with. A retired presenter, June Patel, persuaded the local library to store them temporarily.

At first, the collection looked more like a problem than an archive. Many tapes were badly labelled, and some had been recorded over several times. Others contained long stretches of silence or music that could not legally be published online. June began by listening to short sections and writing basic descriptions. She soon realised that the most valuable recordings were often the least dramatic: people describing changes to streets, shops and workplaces that had since vanished. These ordinary voices, she says, showed how residents spoke about their lives before anyone imagined such conversations might become historical evidence.

The library then invited local college students to help digitise the material. June expected them to focus on the famous guests, but their interests were different. One student became fascinated by old phone-in programmes about rising bus fares; another collected recordings of teenagers discussing music and fashion in the 1990s. Their questions made June notice details she had ignored when the programmes were first broadcast. She had once thought of radio as something that disappeared the moment it was heard. Working with the students changed her view: recordings could acquire new meanings because later listeners brought different concerns to them.

Not everything has been easy. The project team discovered that preserving sound is more complicated than simply copying old tapes onto a computer. Machines capable of playing certain formats are increasingly difficult to find, while damaged tapes may break if handled carelessly. The volunteers also have to decide how much information to record about each item. June calls this “the invisible half of the job”: without dates, names and context, a digital file may survive but still be almost useless to future listeners. For that reason, volunteers are trained to document what they know rather than rushing through large numbers of tapes.

The archive has now started releasing short recordings through the library website. June was nervous about this stage because she feared people might find the material too ordinary. Instead, the clips have produced dozens of messages from former residents. Some identify speakers whose names were missing; others correct dates or explain references that younger volunteers did not understand. June admits that she had originally imagined herself as the person rescuing the collection, but the public response has made her less possessive. “The archive gets better whenever somebody else adds something I couldn’t have known,” she says.

There are still thousands of hours to review, and nobody expects the project to finish soon. Yet the team no longer sees completion as the main goal. The archive is becoming an ongoing conversation between past and present residents, rather than a final, perfectly organised record. The library is even planning workshops in which school pupils will make new interviews to sit beside the old ones. For June, this is the unexpected success of the project: a collection created by a radio station that no longer exists is encouraging the town to keep recording itself.

Several former presenters have also offered to record introductions explaining how particular programmes were made, adding another layer of memory to the collection.