Whisper Cymru: Wales’ accessible broadcast centre sets industry standard

Whisper’s Cardiff base, Whisper Cymru, based at the city’s Tramshed Tech creative hub, is something of a hidden powerhouse of sports production. 

It’s home to Cymru Broadcast Centre, which Whisper created as Wales’ first remote production facility in 2024, specifically to produce Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage.

Whisper Cymru managing director Carys Owens decided that if the facility was being designed to cover parasports, it should offer an accessible workspace for those with disabilities to work on the production.

The facility includes a changing spaces toilet, wide walkways, ramps, power-assisted doors and accessible signage. Its colour schemes and signage have also been designed to ensure the Cymru Broadcast Centre can be used by as wide a range of people as possible.

At the time it opened, Owens said: “Our big ambition was to make the Cymru Broadcast Centre the most accessible production facility in Wales and the UK. Our original target was 20% of production talent with disabilities were going to work on the Paralympic Games behind the scenes and this was at the forefront of the planning when we were looking at building the Cymru Broadcast Centre. 

“We were very intentional about having outreach events, bringing lots of local people into Cardiff, and facilitating outreach events with disability groups.”

Broadcast Tech took a trip to Cardiff to find out how things have progressed for Cymru Broadcast Centre and for Whisper Cymru, two years after the Paralympics.

Whisper Cymru’s sprawling labyrinth of offices that culminate in the self-contained Cymru Broadcast Centre takes up a sizeable area of the Tramshed Tech building, stretching down numerous corridors from a central production base.

Owens explained that, while the number of staff working at Whisper Cymru varies, it flexes up to more than 100 depending on what productions are going through the facility at the time. 

Following the successful production of the Paralympics in 2024, Whisper Cymru and the Cymru Broadcast Centre now handles the remote production of Six Nations rugby, Formula 1, the Winter Paralympics, The Hundred, events for Boxxer, and more.

Whisper Cymru is the only Whisper facility with its own broadcast centre, and as a result, most of the live Whisper productions (including F1, which Whisper moved from Manchester to Whisper Cymru) now come out of here.

Proud of what has been created by Whisper in Cardiff, Owens says: “We built the Cymru Broadcast Centre with the premise that if you build it, they will come. The legacy from the Summer Paralympics for C4 is it is fully accessible and provides the opportunity for disabled people to work across all sports. It’s setting the standard for accessible remote production.”

British swimmer Liz Johnson, who won gold medals in the Paralympic Games and International Paralympic Committee world championships, advised on the whole journey for a disabled person using the facility.

Throughout the facility, there are signs in braille, the galleries are spacious and the desks are custom-built to accommodate wheelchairs. There’s a meditation room with a VR headset showing immersive relaxation content. The changing spaces have been designed to cater for different disabilities, with accessible toilets and showers, including a hoist and a changing bed. 

A calming green is used to help neurodiversity, and a horizontal green line in the middle of the wall offers a line of sight for people with visual impairment to move around the corridors and know where the doors and handles are. 

There are also changes in colours on the flooring each time the surfaces change.

The Cymru Broadcast Centre is in one of the most deprived areas of the UK, and Whisper runs an outreach programme and an academy scheme to try to educate people local to the area about what goes on at the facility, and potentially open up job opportunities for those who wouldn’t typically get the chance to work in television. 

The Friday before I visited, they had 42 children in here having a look around.

“The Whisper Academy trains people who couldn’t get a foot in the door in the industry. We take on 4-6 cohorts every year, providing full time, fully paid placements for a full year,” says Owens. “They work on a variety of different productions and most stay with Whisper once they’ve completed the Academy. We’d love to scale it, if possible, working with others.”

Owens adds: “We also run boot camps where we partner with a college, with funding from the Cardiff Capital Region. Over the last two years, we’ve run five bootcamps of 6-10 days each. Students get to observe different roles, ask questions, get 1:1 time with the staff, and are set tasks to complete. Tramshed Tech also does business models with them, specifically focusing on engineering, to cover the skills they really need.”