Piccadilly Radio plaque unveiled at City Tower, Manchester

When and where was the Piccadilly Radio plaque unveiled?

The plaque was unveiled on the evening of Thursday 13 November 2025 at City Tower in Manchester, the tower block of the Piccadilly Plaza complex where Piccadilly Radio’s first studios were based. The unveiling took place at an event in the building’s 28th-floor Sky Lounge.

Who unveiled the Piccadilly Radio plaque?

Jim Hancock, Piccadilly Radio’s first employee, unveiled the plaque together with Matthew Baddeley of Schroders Capital, which owns City Tower. Former presenters and producers attended, including Andy Crane, Mike Shaft, Pete Baker, Phil Wood, Becky Want and Mike Sweeney.

Matthew Baddeley, the building’s lead asset manager at Schroders Capital, called Piccadilly Radio an icon of City Tower. The authors of the station’s 50th-anniversary book For the Record, Tony Ingham and Brian Beech, are credited on the Piccadilly at 50 site as the people behind the campaign for the plaque, and copies of it are described there as mounted outside and inside the City Tower arcade.

What does the Piccadilly Radio plaque mark?

The plaque commemorates Piccadilly Radio’s first studios and the 50 years since the station launched in April 1974. The building’s owners described the station as an icon of City Tower, and the plaque is set to stay in the building.

City Tower is the tower block of Piccadilly Plaza, the complex where the station went on air at 5am on 2 April 1974. Plenty of Mancunians walk past it every day without knowing what once went out from the upper floors. A plaque by the door is a small, permanent answer to that.

Why a plaque matters for a station that is gone

The 1974 station no longer broadcasts, and its output survives mostly on tape in Manchester Central Library. A plaque is a different kind of archive: it tells people who never heard the station that it existed and where it sat. We think that is worth saying thank you for.

Were you there?

We are a heritage project, not a newsroom. If you attended the unveiling, or you worked in those studios, send us your memory or a photograph you took and we will add it here, with your name or without it. We would rather picture the evening in the words of the people who were in the room.

Piccadilly Radio 261 is on air now, with six free live channels from Manchester. You can listen to our live channels, read the full history of Piccadilly Radio or find out what happened to the station.