Last updated: August 2026
Piccadilly Radio went on air at 5am on 2 April 1974 and was, for a generation, simply what the radio sounded like in Manchester. It was split in two in 1988, gradually renamed, and the last of it fell silent in 2021. This is the whole story, in order.
1974 — The launch
Piccadilly Radio began broadcasting from studios in Piccadilly Plaza, in the centre of Manchester, at five o'clock on the morning of Tuesday 2 April 1974. The first record was Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys, introduced by Roger “Twiggy” Day — an ex-pirate radio presenter, which tells you what kind of station it intended to be.
It was the fifth Independent Local Radio station in the United Kingdom and the first anywhere in the north of England. Before that morning, Manchester had the BBC and nothing else.
The station launched on 261 metres medium wave — 1151 kHz — and 97.0 MHz FM. That number, 261, became shorthand for the station itself: on stickers, in jingles, between every record.
1974–1987 — The full-service years
Piccadilly ran as a proper full-service station: chart music, news, sport, phone-ins, specialist shows, drama and comedy. That breadth is why it turned out so many broadcasters — a young presenter could learn several different jobs in one building.
Chris Evans, Mark Radcliffe, Gary Davies, Andy Peebles, Timmy Mallett, Steve Penk, Geoff Lloyd, Pete Mitchell and Karl Pilkington all passed through. So did the ones who stayed and became Manchester institutions in their own right: Mike Sweeney, Chris Tetley, Tim Grundy, James H Reeve, Dave Ward.
And on the overnight shift from 1974, James Stannage — whose confrontational late-night phone-ins drew a public condemnation from the Bishop of Salford and made him the most argued-about voice in the city.
The full list of presenters and DJs →
1978 — A small change of frequency
European broadcasting frequencies were realigned, and Piccadilly's medium wave signal shifted from 1151 kHz to 1152 kHz. The 261 metres branding stayed.
1987 — 97 becomes 103
A national reorganisation of the FM band moved Piccadilly's FM signal from 97.0 to 103 MHz. A minor technical change at the time — and the reason the FM half would spend the next thirty years being called Key 103.
1988 — The split
By the late 1980s, the Government and the IBA were pressing stations that held both an AM and an FM frequency to stop simulcasting and run two separate services.
Piccadilly did so at midday on Saturday 3 September 1988. Key 103 launched on FM with a contemporary format for a younger audience. The original service continued on 1152 AM, keeping the Piccadilly name.
This is the moment most people are really asking about. Piccadilly Radio did not close in 1988 — it was divided, and only one half kept the name.
What happened to Piccadilly Radio →
1988–2000 — The AM half fades
The AM service drifted towards older music and became Piccadilly Gold. In the mid-1990s it was renamed Piccadilly 1152 as the playlist moved from golden oldies towards easier contemporary music.
Around 1999–2000, owner EMAP folded it into its national oldies brand and it became Magic 1152. That was the end of the Piccadilly name on air, after twenty-six years.
The station later moved into Bauer's Greatest Hits Radio network.
2018 — Key 103 becomes Hits Radio Manchester
Bauer Media announced the change on 18 April 2018, and on 4 June 2018 Key 103 became Hits Radio Manchester. The frequency stayed; the local name went.
2021 — 1152 goes silent
On 26 April 2021, the AM transmission ceased. Forty-seven years after Roger Day opened the station on 261 metres, there was nothing left on the medium wave dial in Manchester.
There was no final broadcast and no announcement. Most listeners never heard it go.
What survives
Manchester Central Library holds over 1,800 tapes of the station's output — music, news, interviews, sport, drama. More than 1,600 shows have been digitised since January 2025 with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and over 750 can be heard free on the library's Sound + Vision pods.
They are also still looking for home recordings of shows the archive never kept.
Where to listen to the archive →
The people
Two of the voices most associated with the station have died in recent years: James Stannage in March 2026, and Umberto Saoncella in December 2020. Both are worth reading about properly.
And what we are
Piccadilly Radio 261 is not the original station. We are an independent, non-profit heritage project with no connection to Bauer Media or any current rights-holder of the Piccadilly name. The tapes belong to Manchester and are looked after by the people who saved them.
What we run is a live station inspired by that era. Our Piccadilly 261 Heritage channel plays the music that was on air in those years, free and around the clock — because a photograph of a studio cannot play you what came out of it.
Sources, and a request
Dates and frequencies here are drawn from publicly documented radio history, including Wikipedia's articles on Hits Radio Manchester and Greatest Hits Radio Manchester & The North West, the Independent Local Radio archive, Manchester City Council, the Manchester Libraries Blog and RadioToday. Public records are thin on the people who worked the unglamorous shifts. If you were there and something on this page is wrong or missing, please tell us — we would rather this grew from memory than from search results.