Harrogate Community Radio is a community-funded media organisation based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Around thirty to forty DJs and presenters record shows at home, upload them to a cloud server, and the station broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. It has done so since 2019. There is no central studio, so there is no building to heat or power.
I am one of the three co-founders. I built and continue to manage the complete digital solution – website, hosting, visual identity, and the tools that hold it together.
Where it started
The station came out of a conversation in a recording studio. Myself, Allan Smyth, and DJ Scooby had just finished a session and realised there was nowhere in Harrogate for local people to share their love of music without a budget, a following, or professional gear.
The people who already had shows elsewhere were the confident ones. The ones who most deserved a platform were the least likely to ask for one. So the question was never “how do we start a radio station.” It was “how do we make it possible for someone to broadcast who has never done it before.”
The 3 Founders: L-R, Me, Scooby, Allan.
The organisation
HCR is a company limited by guarantee, working towards becoming a charity incorporated organisation. Three founders, seven people in the admin team, and a changing group of thirty to forty hosts broadcasting everything from reggae and drum and bass to spoken word, world music, and house. The admin team includes a UX architect, a graphic designer, an audio-visual expert, a social media manager, a gardener, a business analyst, and a barman.
The team communicates via WhatsApp. Hosts use a private Facebook group. Both choices were deliberate – tools people already knew, so no onboarding required.
How the work was done
I consulted with the UX architect on structure and the graphic designer on visual identity, then brought both back to the admin group before anything was built. The community shaped the decisions.
One example: a member flagged that listeners could not find shows by genre, so I built a search function. Another: I recently switched the site font to Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed for people with low vision and dyslexia. Most of the iteration on this project has worked that way – deliberate changes in response to what the community needs, not large-scale redesigns.
The microphone library
We hold twelve broadcast-quality USB microphones. Anyone who wants to try making a show can borrow one for free, along with training and software. If it is not for them, they return it. No outlay, no commitment.
One of our hosts is a single mum who works part time and does a show once a month. Buying a microphone would have been a waste of money she did not have. Borrowing one meant she could just start. That is what removing a barrier actually looks like.
Sustainability
The green practices of the station come down to the green practices of each host, working from home, and we leave that to the individual. The only fixed footprint we have is the website, which we offset through Tree Nation and Ecologi.
If I need to do something, it is to codify the green charter of the station, without being invasive fo the host’s private lives and the way they run their houses.
Is there a tangible difference?
The clearest evidence came during the pandemic. When face-to-face became impossible, I built a remote broadcasting system that let presenters record from home without needing to be in the same room, or the same town. The station kept broadcasting throughout the lockdowns. For some hosts and listeners, that continuity mattered a great deal.
The Stray Ferret recognised the solution with their Best Use of Tech award in 2024. Not a major industry prize, but external validation from people who know the local area.
On reach: we have listeners from London to the Highlands. That is not a figure – it is a fact we know from listener contact and social media. For a station with no marketing budget, run entirely by volunteers, in a town of roughly 75,000 people, that feels like something.
Did the organisation face resistance?
Yes. When HCR started, some quarters of the local business and media community did not take us seriously. Just a bunch of kids playing at radio.
We dealt with it by continuing. We kept broadcasting, kept improving, kept showing up at local events. Longevity turns out to be a reasonable answer to scepticism. When you are still there seven years later, it becomes harder to dismiss.
The one thing I would do differently is document impact more systematically from the start. We have anecdotes and listener messages, but not numbers. Even a simple monthly listener count, kept from the beginning, would give us something more concrete to point to now.
“A great job, crafted with passion and the user’s experience in mind.”
- Simon Bleasdale
How success is measured
We do not chase listener numbers. Chasing statistics would change why we are doing this. We measure success by whether the hosts enjoy making their shows. If they stop, we encourage them to take a rest and come back when they are ready.
The outcomes are still real. Since 2019 the station has broadcast over 4,000 fresh shows. Two hosts have gone on to broadcast for BBC Introducing and a local commercial station. We won Best Use of Tech at the Stray Ferret awards in 2024. And we are still here, which is more than can be said for the other local station that came and went while we kept going.
What this project taught me
I did not set out to build a humanity-centred design project. I set out to build a radio station for people who loved music and had nowhere to share it. But the choices that made it work – the microphone library, the familiar tools, the genre search, the font change – were not really design decisions. They were decisions about people. About who we were building for and what was in their way.
We are muddling towards an unknown utopia. No end goal in sight. But we know who we are for. The people who do not pipe up. The ones who have something worth sharing and have never been given the space to share it. That is enough of a direction to keep going.