Location Location Location

Hi

When the ITV franchises were created was there a specific set of cities where companies could be set up or was it up to the individual companies?

It was all down to transmitter, thats it. That meant sometime weird areas were created.

I'd have thought the locations chosen were just down to being the major city in the region - London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc

The advantages to that are fairly obvious but one major reason why this was important was that the big cities will have had the major Post Office exchanges necessary to connect up to the rest of the country

Not quite the same topic, but I always find it a bit unusual that BBC Radio Lancashire is in Blackburn, when I'd expect it to be based in Lancaster or Preston

Originally launched as BBC Radio Blackburn broadcasting to mainly East Lancashire.

Became Radio Lancashire ahead of commercial radio launching in the area

A regional map was drawn up based on the existing transmitters. Where the successful bidders based themselves was pretty much up to them, but it would have made more sense to choose a major town or city associated with the area (in actual fact, WWN had their studios in Cardiff even though they covered North Wales).

Central News South being in Abingdon must've been the only ITV regional studio facility in its day to be based in a town reasonably near to a big city, rather than in the big city itself?

The Central South area wasn't actually a franchise though, the Abingdon based was picked because it was cheap and reasonably commutable (excellent driving links for staff), when it first launched a lot of staff were relocated from Broad Street and Lenton Lane to Abingdon to get it on the air.

There's an excellent photo tour of an empty CNS building here

Technically HTV Wales' HQ wasn't in Cardiff. I think it was classed as being in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Does Gillingham count? And Plympton?

In the early days of ITV there were studio centres in Didsbury and Aston. Teddington and Elstree also fit that description (though Teddington was a many miles from its regions)

Plympton is a district within Plymouth I think? Although I'd say that's on a par with HTV at Culverhouse Cross.

Same with Radio Kent which was based in Chatham for years, that was originally Radio Medway.

It's now in Tunbridge Wells, which isn't that obvious a town for a regional centre either