Jorvik Radio streams local music, community news, and homegrown talk from York, England, and you can listen free on Radio Shuffle wherever you are. Broadcasting on 94.8 FM, DAB+, and online, it is entirely self-produced, built around the sports, arts, and voices of one historic city rather than a national playlist.
Named for York's Viking past
The station takes its name from Jórvík, the Old Norse name Viking settlers gave York after they captured it in 866, a history detailed by the Jorvik Viking Centre. The name is thought to mean "wild boar bay," and Scandinavian rule over the city left a lasting mark still visible today in street names ending in "gate," from the Old Norse word for road. It is a fitting name for a station built entirely around local identity, a thread the team pulled straight from the ground the city stands on.
From Kickstarter dream to FM frequency in two years
Jorvik Radio began in 2017 as a community project with no studio and no frequency, funded in part through a Kickstarter campaign to get York's newest community station off the ground. According to Wikipedia's entry on the station, the team moved from that initial idea to a full FM launch in just two years, going live at 7am on 4 November 2019 from studios in Burnholme. York Calling covered the run-up to launch as one of the city's most anticipated new media projects in years.
A first song that could only be York
The station's first ever track on air was "Disco Down" by Shed Seven, the Britpop band formed in York in 1990 whose brash guitar anthems became a signature sound of the city's music scene in the 1990s, according to details on the band gathered by Wikipedia. It was a deliberate choice. Few songs carry more local pride in York than a Shed Seven single, and opening the station's history with a hometown band set the tone for everything that followed.
Programming built around the city's Key Commitments
As a licensed community station, Jorvik Radio originates all of its own programming and is required to cover community sport, the arts, local commerce, current affairs, diversity, and faith, obligations laid out in its official "Key Commitments." That means the schedule leans on York's own voices rather than syndicated shows, giving the station a texture that larger commercial stations in the region cannot easily replicate. Listen to Jorvik Radio free on Radio Shuffle to hear a genuinely local slice of English radio, wherever in the world you happen to be tuning in from.