University Radio York | About Us

URY has a rich history of pioneering broadcasting, commencing under a test licence as Radio Heslington in 1967, becoming Radio York in 1968 and culminating in 1969 with University Radio York becoming the first fully-licensed legal independent radio station in the UK.

Over the years, we have been fortunate enough to receive numerous awards, including BBC Radio 1 Student Station of the Year in 2005, and many awards from the Student Radio Association.

At URY we cover a large range of campus events including Student Union Elections, but we also host our own charity events, such as the 40-hour broadcast in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support back in March 2013, where we raised over £1,800. In June 2016, we went a step further and hosted URY’s (then-)longest ever show “URY 101” live from Greg’s Place for 101 hours, all in aid of Yorkshire Cancer Research, for whom we raised a massive £1,700.

We pride ourselves at URY for running all the technical aspects of the radio station ourselves. In summer 2015, the internal audio routing was completely overhauled and converted to audio over IP by the engineering team in a project known as “Beat the Buzz”.

In 2018 we were awarded a grant by the University of York of £40,000 to upgrade our studios, and upgrade them we certainly did. Brand new audio equipment, a total interior re-design, and fancy red/blue colour schemes to match, the 40K project, completed Christmas 2019 and fronted by some of URY's most dedicated members, allowed us to produce highly polished material while also giving the broader community in the University a place to create their own audio content.

Over the decades we've enjoyed ourselves doing all manner of ridiculous things on and off-air. We pride ourselves on our innovative approach to radio that you will struggle to find in the industry, but luckily these ideas are recognised by industry professionals with a plethora of awards. In 2020, nearly 15 years since our last win for gold in the category - we won the gold award for Best Student Radio Station in the country at the Student Radio Awards. The judges praised the attention we gave to our audience and the novel ideas we pushed to the forefront of our content.

In 2021, we were given a license to broadcast on FM at the same time as AM, getting us onto both 1350AM and 88.3FM. In 2023 we decided to finally turn off our AM transmitter for good. To send it off, we broke our previous record by doing a 135-hour long broadcast which included inviting back many of our alumni to do send off shows. As of the 26th of June 2023 we no longer broadcast on AM.

In 2024, we were given a license to broadcast on DAB, making us one of the first student radio stations to be on digital radio