The Romiley Gazette

4th October 2026

3rd October 2026

John Donoghue’s remarkable recordings helped preserve the sounds of Piccadilly Radio’s golden years.

A Bredbury man who spent his spare time recording Piccadilly Radio programmes in the 1980s has played his own small but important part in preserving Greater Manchester’s broadcasting history.

John Donoghue, a keen football fan, regularly recorded local radio programmes at home during the 1980s, when Piccadilly Radio was an essential part of life across the region. He was also a respected commentator, whose views on football were often heard when he contributed to the programmes himself.

Among the voices captured on his tapes were popular sports presenters James H. Reeve and Tommy Doherty, better known to listeners as “James and the Doc”.

At the time, John could hardly have imagined that his collection of cassette tapes would one day become archive material.

But he kept them.

Years later, John wrote about the story in the Romiley Gazette, explaining how a friend from the music world, Judy, became involved after he told her about his collection.

Judy was a neighbour and friend of Tommy Doherty and his wife, Mary. She subsequently passed John’s details to John Pickford, former sports producer at Piccadilly Radio, who was interested in the recordings.

One of John’s tapes had a particularly special significance.

It was given to Judy and eventually heard by Mary Doherty, Tommy’s widow, who was delighted to have the chance to hear Tommy’s voice again.

The recordings have now found a permanent home as part of the Piccadilly Radio Archive at Manchester Central Library.

And this is no longer simply a collection of old tapes sitting on library shelves.

The Manchester Digital Music Archive says the Central Library collection contains more than 1,800 tapes of Piccadilly Radio programmes, covering music, interviews, sport, news, features, drama and comedy.

In 2025, the collection was digitised, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Manchester Libraries Trust. The recordings can now be searched through the Manchester Digital Music Archive, while the complete collection can be listened to at the Sound + Vision pods at Manchester Central Library.

The archive includes the work of many of the station’s much-loved broadcasters. James H. Reeve is represented by five items, and the archive also contains a photograph of him in the Piccadilly studios dating from around 1980.

For football supporters of a certain generation, those recordings offer a remarkable trip back in time.

Before smartphones, social media and instant online scores, local radio was how many supporters followed what was happening around Greater Manchester’s football grounds.

The distinctive voices, jingles, match reports and phone-ins were part of the soundtrack of Saturday afternoons.

And it was listeners such as John Donohue who unknowingly helped ensure that some of those moments survived.

John deserves the credit

It would be easy to look at the archive today and see only the work of a major library project.

But every archive has a beginning.

In this case, there was a Bredbury football fan with a cassette recorder who thought the programmes were worth keeping.

John’s recordings were never made with the intention of creating a historical collection. He was simply preserving programmes he enjoyed listening to.

That decision, made decades ago, now has real significance.

The Manchester Digital Music Archive is actively encouraging people who have their own Piccadilly Radio recordings or memories to come forward.

So while Manchester Central Library and the organisations involved deserve recognition for ensuring the material is preserved and digitised, John Donoghue deserves particular credit for keeping his tapes in the first place and ultimately allowing them to become part of that story.

For John, it must be quite something to know that the recordings he made as a Bredbury football fan in the 1980s can now be heard by people who weren’t even born when those programmes were broadcast.

What began as a personal collection has become part of Greater Manchester’s collective memory.

He pressed the record button. He kept the tapes. And, decades later, the voices of Piccadilly Radio can still be heard.

https://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/piccadilly-radio-archive

30th August 2026

The Liberal Democrats like to talk about the importance of community politics.

Their success in recent years has been built on the idea that local representatives are different from the traditional political parties — that they listen to residents, take up local causes and are prepared to fight on behalf of the communities they represent.

But residents at Padden Brook in Romiley may reasonably be asking a rather uncomfortable question: where are our elected representatives when local residents need them?

Padden Brook is not simply another housing development or an anonymous corner of the borough. The area is subject to an active Tree Preservation Order, with Stockport Council’s TPO 376E made in May 2023 and confirmed in November of that year.

Yet residents say that concerns about what they describe as ongoing abuses and problems at the protected site have been raised repeatedly for more than two years.

According to those residents, correspondence and requests for assistance have been directed towards the Liberal Democrat MP and three local Liberal Democrat councillors.

The claim being made is stark: despite repeated attempts to obtain help, residents say they have received no meaningful response for more than two years.

That deserves an answer.

It is particularly striking when set against the Liberal Democrats’ own emphasis on community politics.

The party has rightly built much of its electoral success around the idea that local representatives should be visible, accessible and engaged with the problems affecting their constituents.

Indeed, the Liberal Democrat argument has often been that politics is not just about Westminster — it is about fixing the problems on your doorstep.

So what happens when residents say they have been knocking on that political door for two years and believe nobody is answering?

This isn’t necessarily an argument about party politics. It is an argument about accountability.

Residents do not expect their councillors or MP to be able to solve every problem. There will always be matters that fall outside an elected representative’s powers. Planning, environmental protection, land ownership and enforcement can involve different authorities and complicated legal processes.

But there is a very simple thing an elected representative can do: respond.

If a complaint cannot be dealt with, explain why.

If another authority has responsibility, tell residents who they need to contact.

If allegations cannot be substantiated, say so.

And if something potentially serious is taking place, make the appropriate enquiries.

Silence, however, leaves residents wondering whether anyone is listening.

The irony is that the Liberal Democrats’ own discussion about the future of community politics has emphasised precisely this kind of local engagement.

The party has argued that its strength comes from good local councillors building trust, with that trust attracting members, campaigners and candidates.

But trust works both ways.

Residents have to be able to trust their elected representatives to listen to them. And elected representatives have to demonstrate that trust through their actions.

Padden Brook therefore presents a straightforward test.

If the allegations being made by residents are wrong, then the MP and councillors have an opportunity to say so.

If the concerns have been investigated, residents deserve to know what happened.

If another organisation is responsible, residents deserve to be pointed towards it.

And if concerns remain outstanding, residents deserve to know what their representatives intend to do about them.

Two years is a long time to wait for an answer.

The Romiley Gazette understands that residents want their concerns taken seriously and are asking their elected representatives to explain their position publicly.

The question now is simple:

Will they respond?

29th August 2026

In October 2006, more than ten months before Stockport Council granted planning permission for a new primary school on a former playing field in North Reddish, local resident Sheila Oliver wrote to the Chair of Sport England with a specific warning. The council, she said, would tell people they could play on the school’s pitch once it was built — but she suspected there would be “many restrictions placed on them as to when it could actually be used.”

Nearly two decades later, that prediction appears to have been borne out. What follows is the timeline of a promise made, apparently redirected, and never clearly accounted for.

The Warning

Oliver’s letter to Sport England set out what was at stake. The Harcourt Street site, she wrote, had originally been a toxic waste dump, but had grassed over during the intervening years to become a valued community open space used for football. She noted the council had already posted “no ball games” signs on most other green spaces in the area, that traffic in the vicinity was already severe enough for the council to acknowledge collisions with pedestrians, and that the council had recently closed a local swimming pool while investing the proceeds into swimming provision in a wealthier part of the borough. Losing the site, she argued, would strip an already deprived area of its last remaining sporting opportunity.

She also raised a related, pre-existing grievance: some £197,000 in commuted sums interest had reportedly been earmarked for children’s playgrounds in deprived parts of Stockport, with no evidence it had been spent more than a year on. She noted that play equipment at Harcourt Street itself — originally paid for by residents — had been dismantled by the council over a decade earlier and never replaced. She asked Sport England to consider objecting to the planning application on the grounds of playing field loss, and copied her letter to the council’s Leader, its Executive Member for Leisure, and its Head of Development Control.

The Justification

The application went ahead. When the council’s own planning officer reported on it, the report acknowledged the site’s existing use — “informal for recreation and more formally for organised sport” — but did not point to a separate replacement playing field elsewhere. Instead, it argued that the new school’s own sports facilities, made available to the community outside school hours, would meet Sport England’s requirements and deliver wider societal benefit, citing hours of operation extending to 9pm on weekdays and 6pm at weekends.

The Figures

Correspondence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007 shows the council’s own account of what this was meant to include. Beyond the roughly £7.6 million core cost of the school, officers said a further £625,000 had emerged through the planning process specifically to meet policy requirements — covering, they stated, a newly laid sports pitch, a multi-use games area, additional changing facilities, and landscaping at the Harcourt Street site itself. This funding was tied to the sale of a separate council asset, the former Fir Tree Nursery site, whose capital receipt officers said represented a significant part of the funding package. When questioned, officers could not fully account for a roughly £100,000 discrepancy between the site’s stated value and the sum actually credited to the school scheme.

The Redirection

By 2013, the promised provision at Harcourt Street itself could not be found. Oliver’s repeated questions to council executive councillors about the “missing” replacement playing fields were dismissed as vexatious rather than substantively answered. A separate Freedom of Information response from around the same time indicated that a different piece of sports infrastructure — a Multi-Use Games Area developed with Reddish North End Football Club, funded by a £418,000 Football Foundation grant, a £60,000 council “Formal Sports Commuted Sum,” and £3,000 from the NHS — had been built not at Harcourt Street but at the former Fir Tree Nursery site instead.

The Confirmation

More than a decade further on, a direct enquiry to the school found no sporting facilities available for general public use. A Multi-Use Games Area does exist on site, but functions as a pupil play surface rather than a bookable community facility — there is no evidence of public booking arrangements, published opening hours for non-pupils, or any access route for local residents. The only outside use identified was a fee-based holiday club run by a private coaching company during school holidays: paid, child-only provision, not the open community sporting access originally used to justify the loss of the site’s playing field.

The Unanswered Question

Two decades after Oliver first warned Sport England that access to any future pitch would likely come with unstated restrictions, the outcome appears starker than even she predicted: not a restricted pitch, but no public access at all. In between, the council’s own paperwork describes specific, funded, on-site facilities that were supposedly delivered in 2007; a comparable facility was instead delivered miles away using different funding; and a nearby, separate pot of money earmarked for deprived-area play provision was, by Oliver’s account, already sitting unspent well before any of this began.

Stockport Council has been asked, over many years and by more than one route, to clarify what became of the replacement sporting provision promised at Harcourt Street. It has not provided a substantive answer, and on at least one occasion questions on the subject were dismissed as vexatious rather than addressed. Whether the failure lies in planning, in funding, or simply in follow-through, one fact is not in dispute: the community access used to justify building over a public playing field in one of Stockport’s more deprived wards does not exist today.

29th August 2026

Stockport’s own Code says that the Council’s governance framework is intended to ensure that it:

• operates in a lawful, open, inclusive and honest manner;
• safeguards and properly accounts for public money;
• uses resources economically, efficiently and effectively;
• manages risk effectively; and
• continually improves how it operates.

• Stockport’s Code places considerable emphasis on openness and accountability. Its own description of governance says that governance is about doing things “in the right way” and being open, honest and accountable.
• The Council’s governance system isn’t simply about whether an officer believed something was permissible. It is supposed to provide assurance and demonstrable accountability.
• Stockport’s Audit Committee arrangements, for example, include evaluating the adequacy of application of the Local Code, monitoring governance issues, and overseeing arrangements for dealing with suspected wrongdoing.
• Stockport’s governance arrangements expressly require effective management of risk. Its external auditor has described the Council’s governance system as including risk management, internal control and corporate risk oversight.