Heart London plays pop and hot adult contemporary hits on 106.2 FM, home to Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden, the biggest commercial radio show in the entire UK with 4.6 million listeners. You can stream it live and free right now on Radio Shuffle, wherever you are in the world.
Born as Crystal FM
Heart London did not launch under its current name at all. Chrysalis Radio won a London-wide broadcasting license in 1994 for a "soft AC" station originally called Crystal FM, according to Wikipedia's history of the station. That name lasted barely a year: the station rebranded to Heart 106.2, running test transmissions from August 1995 before officially launching on September 5, 1995. Its earliest broadcasts even featured live programming relayed from WPLJ in New York City, an unusually international touch for a brand-new London station.
From Soft AC to Hot AC
Heart shifted its musical identity fast, moving away from the original soft adult contemporary format in 1996 toward a more energetic Hot AC playlist, the pop and rock leaning format the station still runs today. That repositioning helped Heart build the kind of mainstream, chart-adjacent identity that would eventually make it one of the UK's biggest commercial radio brands.
A £170 Million Sale That Built a National Network
Chrysalis sold Heart and its sister stations, including The Arrow, Sky News Radio, LBC, and Galaxy, to Global Radio for £170 million on June 25, 2007, a deal that reshaped UK commercial radio ownership. Global began simulcasting Heart London's programming to Heart West Midlands starting April 28, 2008, the first step in folding the station into a much larger national network. By 2010, local London-specific programming had shrunk to just seven weekday hours and four weekend hours, and by 2019 the station carried only the Ofcom-mandated minimum of three weekday hours of local content, with no local programming at all on weekends.
The Biggest Breakfast Show in Britain
What Heart London lost in local identity, it gained in national reach. Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden, co-hosting together since 2019, now runs as the single biggest commercial radio show in the entire United Kingdom, pulling 4.6 million listeners across the Heart network every weekday morning from 6:30 to 10 a.m. That scale puts the show ahead of every other commercial breakfast slot in the country, a remarkable outcome for a station that started life under a completely different name three decades earlier.
Tune In
From a 1994 license win as Crystal FM to hosting Britain's biggest commercial breakfast show today, Heart London has spent thirty years building toward genuine national scale. Stream it free on Radio Shuffle to hear it live.