Spire FM was a UK radio station based in

Salisbury Salisbury ( ) is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England with a population of 41,820, at the confluence of the rivers Avon, Nadder and Bourne. The city is approximately from Southampton and from Bath. Salisbury is in the southeast of ...

Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...

. It was awarded the licence to broadcast to Salisbury and the surrounding areas by the Radio Authority, now Ofcom, in 1991. The station took its name from the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. After several changes of ownership, it was rolled up into

Greatest Hits Radio Greatest Hits Radio is a classic hits radio network in the United Kingdom, owned and operated by Bauer. Overview The network launched on 5 January 2015 as the "Bauer City 2 Network", and rebranded on 7 January 2019 due to the success of Rad ...

in September 2020, ceasing local programming.

History

The station was fully launched on 20 September 1992 (the licence ran from the 5th, when test transmissions began to include programmes about the Salisbury Arts Festival). Spire FM broadcast from City Hall Studios in Malthouse Lane, Salisbury, part of the City Hall entertainment venue. Originally independently owned, it was acquired by Radio Investments Limited in 1995, and from 1996 the station was owned by

The Local Radio Company The Local Radio Company was a British media company, based in Redruth, Cornwall, that owned ten independent local radio stations in the UK. After takeover talks with UTV Media, UKRD Group and Hallwood Financial, UKRD acquired the majority sha ...

, which was a joint venture with

GWR Group GCap Media was a British commercial radio company formed from the merger of the Capital Radio Group and GWR Group. The merger was completed in May 2005. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. O ...

until it was converted into an AIM-quoted company in 2004. TLRC was acquired by

UKRD Group The UKRD Group Ltd was a British media company that owned 15 commercial radio stations in the United Kingdom. The name originates from UK Radio Developments. Since its acquisition in March 2019, it has been run as a subsidiary of Bauer Radio. H ...

in 2009, and

Bauer Radio Bauer Media Audio UK is a UK-based radio division of the Bauer Media Group. History In early 2008, German magazine publisher Bauer bought the radio division of British company Emap, which had been established as East Midland Allied Press in ...

bought UKRD's ten stations in 2019. Spire FM won a prestigious

Sony Radio Award The Radio Academy Awards, started in 1983, were the most prestigious awards in the British radio industry. For most of their existence, they were run by ZAFER Associates, but in latter years were brought under the control of The Radio Academy ...

for Station of the Year in 1994 and the runner-up award in 2003. Other awards included the KPMG Marketing Excellence Award, and Wiltshire Business of the Year finalists.

Bauer Media Heinrich Bauer Publishing (german: Heinrich Bauer Verlag KG), trading as Bauer Media Group, is a German multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Hamburg. It operates worldwide and owns more than 600 magazines, over 400 digital products and 50 ra ...

rebranded the station as Greatest Hits Radio Salisbury in September 2020, as part of their national

network. It now broadcasts national and regional music programmes with local news bulletins.

Programming

All programming on the station was locally produced. Until 2018, Spire FM broadcast

The Vodafone Big Top 40 ''The Sky VIP Official Big Top 40 from Global'' is a radio chart show broadcast every Sunday from 4 to 7pm on Global's Capital and Heart networks, presented by Will Manning. It was started in May 2009 but the show is the descendant of ''The Net ...

chart show (previously

The Pepsi Chart The Pepsi Chart (previously known as "The Pepsi Network Chart Show") was a networked Sunday afternoon Top 40 countdown on UK radio that started life on 1 August 1993 with Neil 'Doctor' Fox hosting the show live from the Capital Radio studios ...

and Hit40UK) which was produced from Capital FM in London and syndicated across over 140 commercial radio stations in the UK. However, the show was withdrawn from syndication in 2018 and now broadcasts solely on

Heart The heart is a muscular organ in most animals. This organ pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system. The pumped blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the body, while carrying metabolic waste such as carbon dioxide to t ...

and Capital stations.

References

Bauer Radio Radio stations in Wiltshire Salisbury Radio stations established in 1992 Radio stations disestablished in 2020 Defunct radio stations in the United Kingdom {{UK-radio-station-stub