How YOU have helped Radio Marsden!!

Over the last few years, SCOLA students and staff have made generous donations to Radio Marsden, the hospital radio station serving the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospitals in London and Surrey. Radio Marsden have been fundraising to raise around £50,000 to refurbish and rebuild their facilities in the two Royal Marsden Hospitals at Sutton and Chelsea.

Radio Marsden has been the College chosen charity for the last 3 years and SCOLA has helped by collecting donations, organising events and raffles and even asking staff to donate to attend their own Christmas do!

On Sunday, the official launch of the new Radio Marsden studio at the Sutton Marsden site took place. The Mayor of Sutton, Paul Burstow MP and Chair of Radio Marsden Jason Reynolds thanked all those that have helped to contribute towards the new studio, offering this vital service for patients.

Phil Boys, Treasurer and longest serving member of the Radio Marsden team (41 years!) reminisced about the early days of the station where the team would ask patients which songs they would like and then went home to record them, bringing them back the next day.

The new studio has state of the art technology and gives presenters, producers and visitors to the studio more space to move around and brings Radio Marsden firmly into the 21st century!

Radio Marsden would like to thank every student and staff member that has contributed to this worthy cause. The service they offer is such a support to patients  – music can be very uplifting, comforting and also a means of escape and so many people are grateful to the Radio Marsden team and their hard work. Staff at Radio Marsden are also all volunteers and yet, manage to broadcast 24/7 to the two sites.

Despite huge efforts, the hard work of fundraising does not end there though…A spokesperson for Radio Marsden said:

‘ this is just Phase One of a larger project. We need to continue our fund-raising activity to enable us to bring our Fulham Road studios up to the same high standard, ready to face the challenges of maintaining our services to the patients of both hospitals. Whilst it’s an exciting time for us, we’re still conscious of the task ahead of us to rebuild our studio at Chelsea – the next and equally crucial phase of our project – which remains unfunded.’

SCOLA will be running children’s craft activities at our Spring Fair on Saturday 8th March in aid of Radio Marsden so please do pop down to see us!