Staffordshire has plenty of radio signals passing over it, but three members of one family decided that did not count as coverage. Cannock Chase Radio FM exists because the district itself never had a station to call its own.
Founded by a Family, Not a Network
Cannock Chase Radio was started by Rob, Jane, and James Hughes, who, according to the station's own history, felt the Cannock Chase District was consistently overlooked despite other stations technically reaching the area. The trio began broadcasting online on 15 November 2014 from studios at Kingston Court in Cannock, opposite the old Electric Palace Cinema, before eventually settling into premises in Bridgtown. It is still run under shared ownership between J Hughes, R Hughes, and Toni C, a genuinely small, local operation rather than a franchised regional brand.
Earning an FM Licence the Slow Way
Getting on FM took the station more than three years of building an online audience first. Ofcom granted Cannock Chase Radio its licence on 30 March 2018, and the station launched simultaneously on 89.6 MHz for Rugeley and 94.0 MHz for Cannock, making it the district's only licensed FM broadcaster at the time, per the same source. Coverage grew again in November 2020 with the addition of 89.8 MHz, extending the signal out to Burntwood, Lichfield, and Brownhills, filling in exactly the gaps its founders originally set out to cover.
Named for a Genuinely Ancient Landscape
The Cannock Chase name is not just branding, it belongs to a real and old place. According to background on the area, the land was established as a royal hunting forest under William the Conqueror and formally granted to the Bishop of Lichfield as a private chase in 1290. Coal mining ran there for roughly seven centuries before the last colliery closed in 1993, and during the First World War the Earl of Lichfield lent the land to the army for two full training camps. Today it holds status as the UK's smallest mainland National Landscape and the largest surviving stretch of lowland heathland in the Midlands, a patch of countryside carrying far more history than its modest 26 square miles would suggest.
"The Greatest Hits and So Much More"
True to its self-description as home to "the greatest hits and so much more," the station mixes popular music programming with local news and community-focused content, distributing across FM, online streaming, TuneIn, Amazon Alexa, and its own iOS and Android apps. That multi-platform push matters for a station this small, giving a genuinely local, family-founded broadcaster the same reach as operations many times its size.
Tune in to Cannock Chase Radio FM on Radio Shuffle for local hits and community radio from the Staffordshire district that finally got a station of its own.