BBC London - History

History

BBC London News launched on 1 October 2001 following changes to the coverage areas of BBC transmitters allowing for the establishment of new editorial areas. The main result was a reorganisation of the BBC's South East region; the London area was to break away entirely, while a new programme, South East Today was to be created for the new South East region. BBC London, as it came to be called, replaced the long-running Newsroom South East.

Greater London and its environs have had a regional BBC television news service for many decades, but the boundaries of the region have always been somewhat nebulous due to the coverage areas of the transmitters used, as television signals do not tend to stick neatly to administrative or historical boundaries. Therefore, while the main focus of "regional" news coverage for this area has always been on the capital itself, it has for much of the BBC's life had to offer coverage of other parts of the Home Counties as well.

There were many incarnations of regional news programmes in this area before the current programme was introduced in 2001. These included the London segment of the Nationwide from Lime Grove Studios; in this case, the regional presenters for London were also usually the main presenters of the national sequence of the programme which followed. Other identities for the London area coverage were London Plus, and finally Newsroom South East.

Originally, the BBC London and the South East region took in the whole of Greater London, together with parts of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Sussex, Bedfordshire, and Oxfordshire. This meant that sizeable communities which probably deserved dedicated programming of their own - such as Oxford, Luton, Crawley and the Medway towns - were often ill-served by a London-biased programme.

The area created for the BBC London programme to broadcast to now covers a much more tightly-defined area, chiefly Greater London but still including parts of Bedfordshire, Essex, and Hertfordshire in the East of England region and parts of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Kent, parts of South Oxfordshire, Surrey and Sussex in the South East England region. There is also some overlap with the editorial areas of other BBC regions in this part of England.

Most of the south midlands, including Oxfordshire (excluding Henley-on-Thames), most of Buckinghamshire, north Berkshire, north east Wiltshire, south east Gloucestershire and south west Northamptonshire, now take an opt-out of South Today while most of Kent and East Sussex is now covered by the new BBC South East region based in Tunbridge Wells, which produces South East Today.