BBC East

BBC East

BBC East's area within the UK
TV stations	BBC One
TV transmitters	Sandy Heath Sudbury Tacolneston
Radio stations	BBC Radio Norfolk BBC Radio Suffolk BBC Essex BBC Radio Cambridgeshire BBC Radio Northampton BBC Three Counties Radio
Headquarters	The Forum, Millennium Plain, Norwich, NR2 1BH, (Since 2003)
Area	Norfolk Suffolk Essex Cambridgeshire Northamptonshire Bedfordshire North Hertfordshire parts of Buckinghamshire (Milton Keynes)
Nation	BBC English Regions
Regions	East and parts of the East Midlands
Key people	Mick Rawsthorne (Head of Regional & Local Programmes)
Launch date	1956

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BBC East is one of BBC's English Regions covering Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and parts of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire (including the City of Milton Keynes). It is headquartered in The Forum, Norwich since 2003. It was also separated into two areas, one with the East area covering mostly in Norfolk, Suffolk & Essex, and another from the West area which covers from Cambridge, serving mostly Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and the three counties.

BBC East's television output (broadcast on BBC One) consists of its flagship regional news service BBC Look East, as well as a 30-minute Sunday morning politics programme.

Former programmes include Weekend, East on Two, Matter of Fact and the football magazine show Late Kick Off (produced by the independent production company Kevin Piper Media).

The region is the controlling centre for BBC Radio Norfolk, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Essex, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, BBC Radio Northampton and BBC Three Counties Radio.

On weekdays, all six stations open transmission at 4 am with a shared regional early morning show before carrying local programming between 6 am and 10 pm. There is also a shared regional programme broadcast across the stations from 10 pm to 1 am on weeknights, except for BBC Essex who has a stand-alone schedule, and other shared programmes at weekends.

BBC East also produces regional news and local radio pages for BBC Red Button and the BBC Local News websites for each county.

In the mid-1950s, the BBC had a temporary headquarters in Norwich at No. 35 All Saints Green.^[1] In September 1956 they moved to a new, larger headquarters at the nearby St Catherine's Close.^[1][2] From here, editions of radio programmes such as Midlands Miscellany were broadcast into the Midlands Home Service before the end of 1956.^[3]

The opening of the Tacolneston transmitting station enabled programmes to be broadcast from Norwich purely for East Anglia on the VHF edition of the Home Service, and regular broadcasts from St Catherine's Close began on Tuesday 5 February 1957.^[4][5] Daily news bulletins for East Anglia began on Monday 10 March 1958, on VHF from the Norwich studios, under the supervision of Richard Robinson.^[6]

The launch of regional BBC television news in September 1957 initially saw East Anglia being covered by the service for London and the South East, but in June 1959, with the forthcoming launch of Anglia Television in mind, the Corporation gave the go-ahead to create a TV operation in Norwich with the purpose of transmitting a bespoke ten-minute news bulletin for the region each weekday.^[7] The BBC's general policy was to ensure a regional TV news service was launched ahead of the regional ITV franchise.

The first TV news bulletin for the east from St Catherine's Close was broadcast at 6.05pm on 5 October 1959, nearly four weeks ahead of the launch of Anglia.^[5] In September 1962, the programme was extended to 20 minutes in length and renamed East Anglia at Six, before becoming East at Six Ten due to a timeslot change the following year. In September 1964, another change of timeslot saw it become Look East, a title the programme still goes under today.

The Norwich-based operation was initially a satellite of the larger BBC Midland region, based in Birmingham. East Anglia was given greater autonomy within the BBC in 1969 after the Broadcasting in the Seventies report recommended the large Midlands and East Anglia region should be split into two, enabling the region to produce and broadcast more of its own regional programming.

During 1997, an opt-out service (originally titled Close Up) was introduced to provide local bulletins for Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. This service provided separate teatime and late bulletins Monday to Friday in an area referred to on EPGs as BBC East (West) rather than BBC East (East) which is the sub-region for Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The last of these bulletins was broadcast on Friday 16 December 2022, as a result of the BBC restructuring of regional programming leading to budget cutbacks.^[8]

Until 1980, regional radio programming was provided by an East Anglia opt-out on BBC Radio 4, consisting largely of daytime news bulletins and a weekday breakfast show, Roundabout East Anglia. The first BBC Local Radio station in the region, Radio Norfolk, was opened on 11 September 1980 and followed by the rollout of stations in Cambridgeshire (1 May 1982), Northamptonshire (16 June 1982), the Three Counties of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire & Buckinghamshire (24 June 1985), Essex (5 November 1986) and Suffolk (12 April 1990).

BBC East's main headquarters and studios are based at The Forum on Millennium Plain in Norwich, having moved from St Catherine's Close in 2003. The move to The Forum was a result of a number of factors: the listed status of the building restricted much of what the BBC did there, the location was less central than the BBC wanted, their ideal location being in Norwich city centre, the equipment was becoming old and needed replacing, and the Disability Discrimination Act meant that their headquarters now needed major modifications to comply with the law.

BBC East also has radio and television studios at the Cambridge Business Park, on Cowley Road in the city, where BBC Radio Cambridge is based and formerly home to the West opt-out of Look East. Local radio studios and television bureaux are also located in Chelmsford, Northampton, Ipswich, and Dunstable.

• BBC English Regions

• BBC Local News at BBC Online
• BBC Look East at BBC Online