Calling Hereford

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BBC Radio 4 Extra - Calling Hereford

Foreign correspondent Hugh Sykes visits the Madley Earth Satellite Station, Herefordshire

Hugh Sykes visits the world's largest earth satellite station where staff have watched news unfold since 1978. From 2009.

Since 1978, staff at the world's largest earth satellite station in Herefordshire have watched global news unfold - immediate, raw and unedited.  

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the British task force landings on the Falklands and the collapse of the Twin Towers - journalists from across the world have beamed their pictures to Madley.  Decades before YouTube and the internet made instant, raw images available, staff here have seen history unfold, often live and uncensored.  

Hugh Sykes visits the site where many of his own reports from around the world have flashed across the huge bank of TV screens. 

Staff, past and present, recall the images that affected them, and their immediate community. Particularly poignant were the images and information coming in about operations in the Falklands, as some workers have connections with the SAS at nearby Hereford. 

Madley has a curious place in the local community. The 32-metre diameter metal monster dominates the local landscape, and moves less than an inch a day as it tracks a satellite 22,000 miles away in the skies above the Indian Ocean.   The dish is surrounded by a nature reserve, and the nearby primary school who come to work and play have the iconic dish as part of their school crest.  

Its site - originally Street House Farm - was notable only for a disused airfield, once used to carry Rudolf Hess to stand trial at Nuremberg.  But this remote part of Herefordshire was also a sheltered bowl of rock between the Malvern Hills and the Black Mountains - rock strong enough to carry a 300-tonne satellite dish and isolated enough to screen out all electronic background noise. 

For Hugh Sykes, this is new territory - a link in the technological chain which has remained invisible and unseen, until now.

Producer: John Byrne

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2009.

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