BROADCAST FROM FLOOR 14

November 2002, east of Aldgate Pump where the city gives way to the estates — a second-hand FM transmitter appeared on the fourteenth-floor balcony of Lefevre Walk in Bow. Forty metres of coaxial cable ran from the rig to a disused aerial bolted to the concrete balustrade. By the time the first signal hit the airwaves, someone three floors up was already recording over a cracked copy of a budget sequencing programme, and the pirate had a name that East London would hear every weekend for the next three years. The frequency was 107.8. The power, twenty watts. The reach, just enough.

The Engineering Was the Art

Most people think pirate radio was about the music. It was — but before a single bar of grime hit the frequency, someone had to build the rig. The transmitters were assembled in kitchens across Hackney Wick from salvaged components: surplus radio chips, ceramic capacitors, aluminium heatsinks stripped from dead amplifiers. Power output mattered more than anything. A twenty-watt rig covered E1 to E9. Anything past fifty watts and Ofcom triangulation became a real risk, so the engineers kept things lean, precise, and temporary. The best stations changed frequency every few weeks.

"The transmitter was in a battered shoebox taped to a ventilation shaft on the roof of Tredegar House. It ran for eleven months before anyone found it."