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New lease of life for Daventry's pioneering radio building

The owner of the home of the first national radio transmitter in the world said he is determined to give it a new lease of 5XX building on Borough Hill in Daventry, Northamptonshire, celebrates the centenary of its opening on site went on to broadcast the BBC World Service for sixty years before being closed by the BBC in Silk bought the 5XX building, named after its transmitter callsign, in 2018 after "admiring it from afar" and is converting it into a base for his business, Juice Sound and Light. The 5XX transmission building contained what was then the most advanced and highest-power transmitter in the the BBC moved out in the nineties, it was left to decay until Mr Silk was offered the chance to buy it."It's a hundred-year-old building and it was left derelict to rot," he said."When we came in, it was a scene from a Halloween movie with cobwebs hanging everywhere and, internally, ivy growing down the walls and the roof was collapsing." Renovating the building was clearly going to be a long and expensive task, but Mr Silk was determined to get started."I've admired the building from afar for about 18 years prior to making the offer and it was always one of those places that intrigued me," he said. There are a few signs of its historic role in the past, including a travelling crane that was installed in 1925 to lift generator the iconic cathedral windows that once bathed the machinery in light had been bricked over. A particularly quirky part of the structure is a reinforced nuclear Silk said: "If nuclear war broke out, there was to be four persons placed in this bunker, and they would survive the shocks."They had supplies and services here for 28 days and, after that, they would open the blast doors and walk out to what was left." Mr Silk said he has spent about £330,000 on the building and there is still a lot of work to do, including the installation of offices and a small wants to ensure the building "maintains its quality for at least the rest of my lifetime, but hopefully for another hundred years". Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.