Last updated: August 2026
Piccadilly 261 Heritage is the channel this whole project was built for. It plays the music Piccadilly Radio played — the records that came out of Piccadilly Plaza on 261 metres from April 1974 onwards. Free, around the clock, from anywhere.
Piccadilly 261 Heritage
Press play. No app, no sign-up, no advert before it starts.
What it plays
Piccadilly launched as a full-service station: chart hits, album tracks, soul, rock, Northern Soul on a Saturday night, and a good deal that a national network would never have touched. This channel follows that instinct rather than a modern playlist.
The spread runs from the 1974 launch through to the point in 1988 when the station was split in two. If you remember hearing it on a transistor radio in a Manchester kitchen, it belongs here.
What it is not
We should be clear, because it matters. This is not a recording of Piccadilly Radio, and we are not the original station. Piccadilly Radio 261 is an independent, non-profit heritage project with no connection to Bauer Media or any current rights-holder of the Piccadilly name.
The original station's archive — over 1,800 tapes of news, music and interviews — is held by Manchester Central Library, and the Manchester Digital Music Archive has done a great deal to preserve it. If you want the genuine article, that is where it lives.
What we can offer is the sound. A heritage site can show you a photograph of a studio. It cannot play you what came out of it.
The rest of the network
Heritage is one of six channels, all free and all live:
- Piccadilly Radio 261 — the flagship stream
- Piccadilly 261 Heritage — this channel
- Piccadilly 80s — non-stop 1980s hits
- Piccadilly 90s — 1990s anthems and Madchester
- Piccadilly Gold — timeless classics
- Piccadilly 103 — dance and club classics
Read the story behind it
If you have arrived here wondering what became of the station itself, we have written it up properly: what happened to Piccadilly Radio, what Key 103 is called now, and the presenters and DJs who passed through, from Chris Evans to Karl Pilkington.
And if you listened at the time, tell us what we should be playing. This channel gets better the more people tell us what they remember.