As of 2006, Canterbury doesn't have cable television. This wasn't the case in the past; many areas were wired in the 1960s and 1970s for the Rediffusion Vision system, and there's plenty of Rediffusion-branded cabling and junction boxes still attached to buildings around the city. There's not much information about Rediffusion on the web, and even less about the Canterbury installation — so here's what I've been able to find out.

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Can you help

If you're able to answer any of these questions, please let me know. I'm particularly interested in hearing from you if you used the system while it was working, and especially if you had a hand in installing or maintaining it.

Other sites

The hackHull Hull Rediffusion site has lots of information about the Hull installation, which was taken over by a different company to rebroadcast Sky channels after the demise of Rediffusion, and Rediffusion equipment in general.

There's more information about Rediffusion at the Rediffusion Cablevision site (which appears to be defunct, so that link points at a 2004 copy at the Internet Archive). The list of regional offices states that Canterbury's was at Rediffusion House, Maynard Road; this is on the Wincheap Industrial Estate, and possibly has the worst TV reception in Canterbury owing to being in a deep valley, so I assume it was just offices rather than being a head-end.

Abingdon had an independent cable TV system in the 1960s; Mastervision Ltd: a brief history of Abingdon's cable TV describes the EMI equipment they used.

Thanks

I'd like to thank the following people for contributing to these pages.