BBC Radio Manchester

BBC Radio Manchester

The archives of BBC Radio Manchester are held by Archives+ at Manchester Central Library. There are thousands of quarter-inch tapes holding radio shows dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Unlock Our Sound Heritage is only digitising a very small part of this vast collection. Here are the shows we have made available so far…

Voice in the Crowd

This programme features over 100 short interviews with people about their careers and everyday lives conducted between 1971 and 1975 by Eric Purnell, presenter, producer and deputy news editor at BBC Radio Manchester. The breadth of scope is amazing – the interviews include a suffragette, a sword-swallower and a lollypop man! Here are some clips from the show. All material copyright BBC Radio Manchester. All rights reserved.

Fight Like a Girl

She just asked me one day…‘would I like to wrestle?’ The life of a woman wrestler in 1970s Manchester ...
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Women’s Voices in the Crowd

Vicki Caren reflects on some of the women's voices she has catalogued so far... I am the Cataloguing Manager for ...
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Voices in the Crowd

BBC Radio Manchester began broadcasting almost 50 years ago and at that time it was the biggest local radio station ...
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1980s news shows

We digitised a batch of 1980s news items mainly from the Up and About morning programme. They include all sorts of local politics and personalities. We chose tapes which included LGBT-related stories so we could feature them during LGBT History Month 2019.

Manchester Underground

This is a six-part programme researched and presented by Ken Howarth, founding archivist of the North West Sound Archive. Ken goes underground and finds air raid shelters, tunnels and captures all sorts of weird and wonderful sounds. You can listen to these radio shows at the Archives+ search room at Manchester Central Library. You can read about the BBC Radio Manchester collection online at the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue. The British Library collection reference is UAP002. The local reference is RMAN.