Introduction to Cumbrian Local Radio

I would love to write this in 107.5 words, but radio isn’t about writing, it’s about hearing and listening. For our team of volunteers that is behind why I get to write this, they want to be seen and heard in the community they serve.

For you, for finding this page, as part of our present and future, this website switched on in early June 2026, welcome!

I am the founder, the creator and generally the key fundraiser for Eden FM Community Radio, as it was, licenced full time in 2014. It is the ‘Not for Profit Ltd Company’ behind what is now Cumbrian Local Radio.

Confused?

June 2010 – Four Seasons, and plenty of reasons…

A busy summer to remember, I was knocking on doors, you could say, and I was selling an idea to people in businesses who I hadn’t met before, in the town that I had only moved to with my family in the March of 2010. How do you sell something that doesn’t actually exist and what some might say is just a vision?

As to why I did it, well, that journey has been documented now in a series of printed publications (over 225 in print and online). The project was supported by local businesses then and it still is today. Our gratitude and thanks go to those who helped and continue to help make it happen. 

They believed it could and that it would happen. The publication was to be called ‘Eden Local’ and the idea it was launching, was to be named ‘The Eden Project with a Difference’. It would get businesses seen and heard in the community they served.

The magazine was to be posted through 6,000 doors in the market town of Penrith in the Eden Valley, Cumbria, where it was based. By the end of the summer, Lee had enough support to design, print and distribute.

Before the clocks went back that October, 19 local businesses had signed up to advertise in the new publication, along with three community organisations, one charity, one secondary school, the local leisure centre and the District Council.

As the clocks did go back, the first Eden local was off to print and was published on 10th November 2010. One year on, the Eden FM studios were being built. At 10:00am on Friday 24th November 2011, Eden FM Radio switched on for its first broadcast.

Why the name change? Well, there’s more than a few Eden FM radio stations now, but there is just one Cumbrian Local.