Accurate maps of ITV regions

this is very interesting because we lived in south wootton in the 1980s which is a village just outside king's lynn, but close to sandringham - about a 5-10 min drive at most.

we were never able to get anglia, and even the yorkshire picture was poor.

i remember my dad getting up on the roof and eventually settling on central where we had the the best picture (would have been 1985/6)

we moved a few miles south in 1989 - but still firmly in the king's lynn and west norfolk area and we had anglia west, but i can see from the regional map we should have had anglia east - i don't know anybody who had anglia east - all my friends had the same regional news.

when did the sandringham relay go live and did the sandringham actually rebroadcast anglia west or east? it would seem strange that sandy heath would have a stronger signal than a transmitter a few miles down the road?

Arguably the belated setting up of "Border Scotland" was some kind of victory for viewers, some of whom lived twenty miles from Scotland's capital city but were getting local news about Keswick. They still did even after Border Scotland's creation....but there was opt-out South of Scotland news coverage, plus Scottish sports programming.

It was the reallocation of the Belmont transmitter from Anglia to Yorkshire mid-franchise which caused consternation for many. Yorkshire was a strange area in that northern parts of the county were served by Bilsdale in UHF terms and thus received Tyne-Tees. And some communities in southern Yorkshire were served by Belmont

Some parts of the Scottish Borders, like the area around Lauder and Oxton for example, can get usable signals from Selkirk and the Lauder relay (Border TV), Craigkelly (STV) and Chatton (Tyne-Tees).

In the 405 line VHF days STV was receivable in parts of the Borders from Black Hill on channel 10....the same applied to Tyne Tess which was viewable on channel 8 from Burnhope. I also recall a time in 1969 or 1970 when the STV picture we were receiving in Jedburgh was subject to a lot of interference. When STV closed down for the night, the reason became clear, as a grainy, but recognisable picture from Yorkshire TV, from Emley Moor which also broadcast on channel 10, was receivable.

But that was some decades after the IBA was replaced wasn't it?

December 1981



Sandringham (or Kings Lynn, 'official' name) initally relayed Sandy Heath. At some point (possibly when Anglia split the region in two in 1988) it was transferred to Taccy

To go back to the OP's question; I still have a copy of the original 1966 TAM (Television Audience Measurement) wall map of the ITV regions in my office. This showed the precise marketing areas of the 405-line VHF service along with all the significant overlaps. I'll try and grab a decent picture of it.

One of the applicants for the South and South East region in the 1980 ITV franchise auction had a proposal to split the region into five sub-regions around each transmitter each with its own local identity and local programmes.



The Central South region once intrigued me and I have wondered whether it would have been a viable ITV region in its own right covering the south midlands, inner parts of the south east, and the Cotswolds. It used to receive Central News West from Birmingham until the end of the 1980s when it was replaced by Central News South.

Interesting map - never seen that one before. I think Westy were being just a little ambitious about how far into Somerset they covered. Yes you can get Westcountry in places like Taunton and Yeovil with a good aerial but that doesn't alter that it was far more common to receive HTV West once you ventured outside of Devon.

It does also highlight the problems they had in that the transmitter coverage doesn't lend itself to the best way to carve up the region in 4 bits when you consider the population alignments within the region. Instead you've got parts of the region that should editorially be 'South' (like Torbay and Newton Abbot') in the 'East' Sub opt which geographically covers half the region and includes the bits of Somerset and Dorset they broadcast to, and there's no getting away from the insanely powerful Caradon Hill transmitter which was supposed to be for 'South' viewers but could actually be received all over the region (500KW ERP + being over half a mile above sea level + being located more centrally than 'south' = one damn huge area that it covers) and so it overlaps into the sub regions to the point that there are people living in the areas where the other 3 opts were based who would have been receiving 'south' news.

However, it was good to have a service like this. I can't imagine it cost that much to do this. The subregional studios were basically the same setup as IVC booths - just a tiny space with a single fixed camera, and they were all based in local centres that existed anyway , where there was already the expertise to shoot and produce packages for the main news service, and where some sort of studio had to exist to allow studio interviews to be done outside of Plymouth. Meanwhile the transmission infrastructure to do the sub opts already existed due to the sub-regional advertising which was already there.

And tbh I get a bit peeved when people who have never lived in the south west start deciding that there was absolutely no value in having a subregional service in this 'small region'. Whilst it may not have a huge population, geographically Westcountry is a pretty decent sized region. Transport links are also not very fast (particularly in Cornwall) and so it can take a long time to cover what is notionally not a very long distance compared to parts of the country with motorways and fast rail. I have lived my entire life within the Westcountry transmission area but in 4 different places and there are chalk and cheese differences between them. People who live in Redruth or Barnstaple do not care about what happens in Plymouth any more than someone who lives in Manchester is interested in Birmingham. In the Westward/TSW era the news service was heavily skewed towards Plymouth and South Devon and was not relevant to much of the transmission area. Yes in the early days that would be because those areas were easiest to cover from a technical perspective, but in later TSW days things could have changed but they didn't.

Westcountry's subopts were a very good idea - it was nice that you could see some news (even if it was only 5 minutes of it) that was produced locally about things that had happened near to you.

Whilst I can see it being 'reasonable' for the subopts to have gone in 2009 given how much regional news on ITV was being scaled back nationally, I have never accepted it to be 'reasonable' to essentially close Westcountry down and move everything up to Bristol because it's 'only the south west', particularly when the BBC did not and do not intend to do this.

Re Westcountry,

I believe there were a few rural dwellings. on a line, between Tintagel and Launceston on the map above, which could access all four regional news services. They had adequate analogue reception of Redruth, Caradon Hill, Huntshaw Cross and Stockland Hill.

You seem to be referring, in broad terms, to the non-franchise 'Thames Valley' news region that briefly existed in the 00s. Central South plus parts of the original Meridian area. I think it worked pretty well in terms of local news coverage.

My question hasn't been answered though. In short, does Central South no longer exist, even on paper, and does the Meridian area now officially cover Oxfordshire, etc? [Just because they get Meridian News doesn't make them officially part of the S/SE franchise area]. Is the former Central South sub-region now played out by Chiswick, and treated to all intents and purposes as Meridian?

They were a nice idea. Although I appeared on one once but couldn't see my appearance and only found out because a friend on the opposite coast told me

It certainly did at the time the Thames Valley service operated - different viewers in the 'region' got different non-news regional programmes depending on whether they were originally covered by Central or Meridian as there had been no actual boundary change. After Thames Valley ended Meridian took over the whole patch (including the bit that had originally been Central South) but at that time there probably was still no legal boundary change to the licence.


I would imagine this changed in 2014 at the same time Wales was officially split from the West region and merged with Westcountry to reflect what had already been done operationally several years previously - that's particularly because an often-forgotten chapter in the 'Thames Valley' saga is that the far western part of the Central South region was (also unofficially) incorporated into the West region when Thames Valley launched.

But as has been proven consistently over the past 20 years ITV don't need to worry too much about what is written down on paper - if any paper turns up stating that Central South still exists, OFCOM will just tear that up for them.

Thanks Chris. The 2014 date would make sense, and the regional maps posted above certainly indicate that the Central South region is now officially Meridian.

If course, these days it matters less and less due to the lack of non-news regional variations. I imagine, on the rare occasion a regional programme is shown, the 'Oxford' region (easier to say than former Central South) will now see the S/SE offering, rather the the Midlands one.

The bizarre arrangement from 2009 was that the Oxford region was played out from Leeds and was effectively Central (I think they shared a lot of adverts with the West Midlands and regardless, they were part of the ITV Central advertising region), but their local news service happened to come from Meridian. I like to imagine this as if regional continuity still existed: then it would have been 'Next on Central it's Meridian News'; these days it would be 'Next on Meridian it's Meridian News'.

I'm assuming nothing in the Oxford region is played out from Leeds now, unlike the East and West Midlands regions.