I was in the pub a while back and someone at the next table was saying how people from London were driving up house prices in Harrogate. Nobody argued with him. A couple of people nodded. It was the sort of thing you hear in this town and let go past you.

I let it go past me too. It stayed with me though, because he was not really talking about houses.

The split nobody argues about

Harrogate does not have a loud division. There is no single row that everyone has picked a side on. What we have is quieter than that.

There is the Harrogate of the Stray and the postcards, and there are parts of town that look nothing like it. There are people who grew up here and people who arrived in the last couple of years. Both call the place home. They rarely describe the same place.

You do not see that gap at a public meeting. You hear it in a pub, in an offhand line about who is pushing prices up, or in a small assumption about who else is in the room. Who else lives here. Who the town is really for.

And the man in the pub had a point. Prices here are real, and so is the feeling of being priced out of the town you grew up in. Waving that away would be easy, and it would be wrong.

What AMARC says community radio is for

AMARC, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, has represented stations like ours since 1983. Around 3,000 members across 110 countries.

Its Community Radio Charter for Europe sets out what a station like ours is supposed to do. Two lines stand out. Stations should “promote the right to communicate, assist the free flow of information and opinions” and “contribute to the democratic process and a pluralist society”. They should also “provide a right of access to minority and marginalised groups and promote and protect cultural and linguistic diversity”.

Read that plainly. It is not an instruction to serve one group very well. It is an instruction to keep people who would otherwise never hear each other in the same place.

For years I read that as the international end of community radio. Stations in places with real conflict, broadcasting in two languages because they have no choice. Then I sat in a pub in my own town and heard the quiet English version of it.

What that looks like on a schedule

At HCR a 1940s music show sits a few hours away from hard dance. There is a Tamla Motown series, free jazz, drum and bass, heavy metal, and out of copyright books read aloud by a former librarian of Harrogate. None of it is arranged to make a point about cohesion. It ended up next to each other because people offered it.

Our presenters run from their twenties to their early eighties. Around 40 are active at the moment, out of roughly 60 who have broadcast since we started on Yorkshire Day 2019.

There is one rule for getting on air. You need a connection to Harrogate. You might have grown up here, moved here last year, or moved away years ago and kept the town in your head. That rule covers the man in the pub, and it covers the person he was complaining about.

Virtual Insanity, our online festival, ran again over the May bank holiday. DJs came in from across the Harrogate area, alongside guests from the town’s nightlife. Nobody had to agree about anything. They shared a bill, and people listened to the lot.

What radio cannot do

No radio station fixes house prices. No show closes a gap in income or makes a town affordable. If I claimed otherwise you would stop reading, and you would be right to.

What a station can do is smaller, and I still think it counts. You hear a voice from a part of town you never walk through. Someone who moved here in January hears someone who has been here sixty years talking about the same streets. A person who has never felt spoken for on the radio gets an hour a week and a microphone.

None of that settles an argument. It does something more basic than that. It makes a town audible to itself, which is hard to manage when everyone is quietly sorting themselves into groups that already agree.

That is the case for local radio in Harrogate, and it is most of the reason I keep going with it.

Harrogate Community Radio broadcasts online 24 hours a day and is available on the TuneIn app and Alexa, with listen again on Mixcloud. If you have a connection to this town and something you know a lot about, get in touch at info@harrogatecommunityradio.online.