Last updated: August 2026
Manchester Central Library holds over 1,800 Piccadilly Radio tapes. More than 750 digitised shows can now be heard free on the library’s Sound + Vision listening pods, with over 1,600 preserved digitally since January 2025. A selection is also online. Here is where to find it — and how you can help fill the gaps.
Manchester Central Library — the real archive
This is the collection. Over 1,800 tapes of Piccadilly’s actual output: music shows, news, interviews, sport, features, drama and comedy, spanning the 1970s to the 1990s.
Between January 2025 and now, more than 1,600 shows have been digitised, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Manchester Libraries Trust, with the Archives+ team caring for the collection. Over 750 are already available to hear.
How to listen: in person, on the Sound + Vision pods at Central Library in St Peter’s Square. Free. You do not need to book a researcher’s appointment or be a member of anything — you can walk in and listen to Manchester radio as it actually sounded.
Online
A selection has been published by Archives+ on SoundCloud and Mixcloud — not the full collection, but enough to hear what the station sounded like without travelling to Manchester.
The Manchester Digital Music Archive also maintains a Piccadilly Radio section, with contributions from listeners and people who worked there.
The Manchester Libraries Blog has written the story of the rescue itself, under the title Nobody Did It Better – Saving Piccadilly Radio, which is worth reading if you want to know how close the collection came to being lost.
They are still looking for missing shows
This is the part worth passing on. Central Library has publicly appealed for home recordings of Piccadilly shows that no longer exist in the archive. Plenty of what went out was never kept by the station — the only surviving copy of some programmes is a cassette somebody taped off the radio at the time.
If you have one: they will digitise it free of charge and return the tape to you. A C90 in a shoebox in a loft in Stockport may be the only copy in existence of a show broadcast forty years ago.
If that sounds like something in your attic, read Manchester City Council’s appeal and get in touch with them directly. It goes to the library, not to us.
Where we fit in, and where we do not
We should be plain about this. Piccadilly Radio 261 does not hold the archive and has no connection to it. We are an independent, non-profit heritage project. The tapes belong to Manchester, they are looked after by people who did the hard work of saving them, and that is exactly as it should be.
What we run is a live station inspired by that era — original present-day programming, not archive recordings. If you want the genuine article, the library is the answer, and we would rather send you there than pretend otherwise.
If you want something to listen to in the meantime, our Piccadilly 261 Heritage channel plays the music that was on air in that era, free and around the clock.
More on the station
What happened to Piccadilly Radio — the full story, frequency by frequency. The presenters and DJs — including the nine who went on to national careers. What Key 103 is called now.
Sources
Figures on this page come from Manchester City Council, the Manchester Libraries Blog, RadioToday and the Manchester Digital Music Archive. Details of opening hours and availability can change — check with Central Library before travelling. If anything here is out of date, please tell us and we will correct it.