Rediffusion in the Walls

Some houses still have a dead television network in the wall. A small plastic switch by the skirting board, a junction box outside, a bundle of balanced pairs disappearing into brickwork. It doesn't look like much because it was never meant to be spectacle. Rediffusion was a pipe for the future, and pipes are allowed to become invisible once people have agreed to depend on them.

The company began as Broadcast Relay Service Ltd in March 1928, after Joshua Powell's early relay work in Clacton. By January 1929 it had opened a cable radio service in Hull, offering households an easier bargain than weak wireless reception: a selector switch and a loudspeaker, with programmes carried in by wire. A 1941 Broadcast Relay Service account describes the system in almost municipal language, with central control, receiving stations, feeders, sub-amplifier stations, and transformer kiosks. Broadcasting again, but with less weather in it.

That is the part I like, and mistrust. Rediffusion made radio and television feel domestic before they were fully domesticated. The signal didn't arrive as a general atmosphere anyone could tune. It arrived as a service, routed, selected, maintained, and billed. Later cable systems used multiple twisted-pair cables, wall or window-frame rotary switches, and simplified TV sets without tuners or RF front ends. The set in the corner was not quite an ordinary receiver. It was a terminal.

There is a line from this to the television rental shop, though Rediffusion feels colder and more infrastructural. Renting a set gave modernity a counter, a payment book, an engineer who might call on Thursday. Rediffusion put the same dependency behind plaster. You didn't just rent the object. In some streets, you rented the path by which the object knew what to show.

The technical oddness is beautiful in the wrong way. Hackaday's account of a Canterbury Rediffusion installation describes telephone-derived cabling, street-corner repeater boxes, a 12-position selector switch, and older houses where the remnants still sit under paint or dust. Terence Eden opened a Rediffusion junction box at a London house in 2020 and found what looked like sets of six twisted pairs. That is not nostalgia as an idea. It is nostalgia with screws in it.

The network also had stranger ambitions than local inconvenience. Rediffusion was tied to British Electric Traction, then overseas relay systems, rented sets, commercial television, and colonial media pipes. In Hong Kong, Radio Rediffusion began in 1949, and subscription television launched on 29 May 1957 using the same high-frequency wired distribution technique as the UK. By 1967, RTV had more than 60,000 subscribers. The future was exported as cabling, too.

By the end of the 1980s, the old UK wired radio and television distribution system had gone. Better aerial reception, different cable technology, cheaper receivers, corporate mergers, all the usual practical reasons. However, the more interesting disappearance is architectural. Rediffusion did not vanish like a shop sign. It retreated into the fabric of houses, leaving behind switches nobody turns, junction boxes nobody recognises, and phrases like "on the pipe" or "on the relay" that make television sound briefly physical again.

Rediffusion belonged to a stranger domestic settlement: the future arrived by subscription, through a socket, with a company van somewhere in the background. The programme was public culture. The route into the room was private infrastructure. Now streaming has made that arrangement feel normal again, except cleaner, quieter, and harder to see. The old box on the outside wall was at least honest enough to rust.

Sources:

Rediffusion — Wikipedia

Rediffusion History — Remembering Rediffusion

Broadcast Relay Service — Remembering Rediffusion

A Short History — This Is Rediffusion from Transdiffusion

Rediffusion Television: Early Cable TV Delivered Like Telephone — Hackaday

Opening a Rediffusion Junction Box — Terence Eden

Rediffusion in Hong Kong — The Industrial History of Hong Kong Group