Radio BBC Wiltshire

BBC Wiltshire is the BBC Local Radio station and BBC Online service for the English county of Wiltshire. The station marked its 20th anniversary in 2009.

The station was launched as BBC Wiltshire Sound on 4 April 1989, with its main studios and headquarters in Prospect Place, Swindon. The first presenter heard on air was Paul Chantler. The early logo of the station featured the White Horse at Westbury. BBC Wiltshire Sound had a reputation for solid local programming focusing on news and information.

From 1991 to 1994 the station's Programme Editor was Mike Gray, who left to found the successful Kiss 102 and Kiss 105 radio stations in Manchester and Yorkshire. Amongst Mike's innovations was giving 17 year old Swindon student Mark Franklin his own programmes, which led to him being spotted and hired as a presenter on Top Of The Pops. Other specialist music presenters at the time included leading jazz singer Rosemary Squires.

One of BBC Wiltshire Sound's best-known features was the long-running soap opera Acrebury in which all the characters were voiced by presenter and actor Gerry Hughes, for which he was awarded a Guinness World Record. The city of Salisbury was given its own breakfast show for a time, due to its relative isolation in the south of the county. However both the Salisbury breakfast show and Acrebury were discontinued as part of a virtual relaunch of the station in 2000. Along with a number of presenter departures, the changes led to listener protests at the station's headquarters and unflattering headlines in the local newspaper.

The 2000 relaunch gave listeners in Swindon separate programmes from the rest of the county, introduced in response to the rapid growth of the town and its new unitary authority status. New presenters brought in for the Swindon programmes included Dan Chisholm and Peter Heaton-Jones. On 11 November 2002, the separation was enhanced when the station was effectively split into two different services: BBC Radio Swindon, covering the town and surrounding areas, and BBC Radio Wiltshire for the rest of the county. Originally the two stations had their own discrete programmes for most of the day, but by 2007, following a number of schedule changes and presenter departures, only the breakfast shows remained separate. All other programmes were simulcast on both stations.

On 4 April 2009, exactly 20 years after the original launch, the two stations effectively merged again and became a single entity branded as BBC Wiltshire. This became the umbrella name for the radio station and online service, in common with branding policy across most of the BBC local radio network. Swindon retained its own breakfast show, for which the branding Swindon's BBC Wiltshire is used.