Brooklands Radio broadcasts pop hits, talk shows and local news 24 hours a day to Weybridge and the surrounding Surrey boroughs, run entirely by volunteers out of a building above the town's museum and library. Its name is not a marketing invention. It comes from one of the most significant patches of ground in British engineering history, sitting just outside the station's own front door.
From a Hospital Radio Trolley to 24-Hour Internet Radio
The station's roots go back to 1965, when Alan Timbrell and a group of friends set up a hospital radio service at Weybridge Hospital, according to Brooklands Radio's own history page. Timbrell reassembled that original team in 2005 to mark 40 years of broadcasting, and the reunion led directly to the station's modern form. Brooklands Radio ran three separate 28-day trial FM broadcasts licensed by Ofcom in 2006, 2007 and 2009, plus a month-long DAB trial across the whole of Surrey in May 2015, before settling into round-the-clock internet broadcasting from 2009 onward.
Named After Motorsport's Birthplace
The name comes from Brooklands, the site that opened on 17 June 1907 as the world's first purpose-built banked motor racing circuit, according to Autopedia's history of the track. Built as a 2.75-mile concrete oval with banking nearly 30 feet high in places, it hosted decades of British motorsport before closing to racing. The location's own name reaches back even further, tracing to Robert del Brok, the 12th-century Lord of the local Manor whose name eventually became "Brooklands."
Also the Birthplace of British Aviation
Motor racing was only half of what made the site famous. Brooklands became one of Britain's first airfields, and in 1908 it hosted the first flight of an English-designed aircraft flown by an English pilot, Alliott Verdon-Roe. Thomas Sopwith opened his Sopwith School of Flying at the site in February 1912, and the location went on to play a role in British aviation manufacturing for decades afterward, eventually including work connected to Concorde. Few community radio stations anywhere in Britain are named after a site with that dual claim to fame.
A Voice for Towns Outside the Spotlight
Brooklands Radio positions itself as filling a gap left by larger London and south-east England stations, aiming, in its own words, to be "a voice for local people, providing education and training in all aspects of broadcasting, supporting local voluntary bodies and helping local businesses." More than 40 volunteers keep the station running across a catchment area of roughly 400,000 people spanning Elmbridge, Runnymede, Spelthorne and Woking, with a deliberately loose format that the station says lets "variety, entertainment and new ideas flourish" rather than sticking to a rigid playlist.
A Small Station, A Landmark Name
Brooklands Radio's whole existence traces back to a hospital radio trolley from 1965 and a 40th-anniversary reunion four decades later, but the name it settled on ties it permanently to a piece of ground where British motorsport and aviation both effectively began. That is a lot of history for a volunteer-run community station to carry, and it wears it well.