Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Weird waves and field notes from a London new town.
Radio Thamesmead began in 1978 as a cable service wired into the estate, broadcasting out of a cupboard in a church hall before it got as far as a studio at Tavy Bridge. It reached FM in 1990 on 103.8, was sold into private hands and renamed Millennium 106.8 in 1997, became Time 106.8 two years after that, and was shut down for good in April 2009. RTM.FM took the call sign back in 2018, when the arts charity TACO! commissioned Sam Skinner to make an artwork out of it.
It broadcasts from a purpose-built studio inside TACO!'s building on Cygnet Square, alongside the gallery, the event space and the bar, with around ninety local people on the roster. The schedule is theirs to fill: live-to-air performance, experimental music, children's programmes, dialectics and archive oddities, something like twenty shows in rotation.
Concrete utopia, still talking.
