BBC Radio WM
BBC Local Radio service for the West Midlands
BBC Radio WM is the BBC's local radio station serving the West Midlands conurbation, an urban area centred on Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Solihull, and the Black Country in the English Midlands.
It broadcasts on FM (95.6 MHz), DAB, digital television, and on the internet via BBC Sounds. It is broadcast from the BBC studios at The Mailbox in Birmingham city centre, and is primarily transmitted from the station near Sutton Coldfield in Birmingham.
According to RAJAR, the station has a weekly audience of 193,000 listeners and a 2.2% share as of December 2023.
History
The station launched as BBC Radio Birmingham on 9 November 1970 and on 23 November 1981, the station changed its name to BBC WM to reflect that the station broadcasts to a wider area than just Birmingham. This date also saw the station launch a second MW transmitter to improve MW reception in Birmingham.
A short-lived service called WM Heartlands ran between early 1989 and 1991 serving the 'Heartlands' area of East Birmingham using the 1458 medium wave frequency. It ran as an experiment, opting out from 8 am until 12 am. Further wavelength splitting took place later in 1989 when on 30 October 1989, the BBC Asian Network launched as a part-time service on MW and in 1996, the Asian Network became a full time service. Consequently, at this point, BBC WM stopped broadcasting on MW.
In the 1990s, as an economic measure, BBC WM took over BBC Coventry & Warwickshire in Coventry and Warwickshire.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “BBC Radio WM” is bBC Local Radio service for the West Midlands. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Radio, Local and service, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “bBC Local Radio service for the West Midlands” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4835005. VIAF identifies the subject as 150347916. The Library of Congress control number is nb2004315141. Authority coordinates are 52.476, -1.905. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1970, 1981 and 1989.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “BBC Radio WM” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.