The Crossed Wires Festival returns to Sheffield this weekend.

The event – a curation of some of the biggest and best podcasts in the land – is hosted at the City Hall, Crucible, Cole Brothers, and Leah’s Yard, as well as other stalls and gatherings in Barker’s Pool and across the city centre.

Sheffield doesn’t host many national spectacles. The World Snooker Championship is a unique event for the city, although for how much longer we don’t know. Tramlines is a major music festival, but Sheffield is hardly the only city to have one of those. Perhaps, then, podcasts could fill the void.

READ MORE: I went to ‘secret’ Leeds layby loved by fans of niche hobby

READ MORE: The bustling West Yorkshire town with wonderful shops and its very own lagoon

Dino Sofos, co-founder of Crossed Wires and owner of Persephonica, a Sheffield-based podcast company that has founded and produces some of the biggest podcasts in the country, thinks it could. “Far too many events are in London and the South East,” he said.

“I think it’s very important that people in the North have a chance to attend a national event in their region.

“We are bringing all these big names to Sheffield, and a lot of that just happens in London. But it rarely happens in places like Sheffield.”

Big names are certainly aplenty. Radio 1 DJ Greg James is involved as a creative director after he attended last year’s debut album as a mere punter. He is hosting an event with Sheffield hero Michael Palin. Then there’s Nick Grimshaw and the Dish Podcast, Help I Sexted My Boss, Pod Save the UK, and Greg James’ own Tailenders.

Dino, who co-founded the festival with Tramlines co-founder and Sheffield entrepreneur James O’Hara and radio presenter Alice Levine, said it’s important to bring events like this to Sheffield. The former BBC producer grew up in Sheffield and has experienced a lot of stuffiness from London-centric bosses throughout his career. He wants to challenge this.

Dino told a story of two lads from Chesterfield who stumbled across the event last year. They met Greg James there and ended up chatting to him. As amateur podcasters themselves, they asked him for some tips, and the next day, they were in a studio with him recording some jingles for their own podcast. “I think it’s vitally important that people have access to the creative industry,” Dino said.

Access to the creative industry has clearly been a central tenet of this year’s event. In addition to the larger, ticketed events, BBC Sounds is hosting a fringe stage in the Cole Brothers building. In Leah’s Yard, local podcasts will get the chance to host special episodes. There are also after-parties and a range of free events in Barker’s Pool.

“We are filling it with some of the biggest talent for free, and that’s incredibly exciting, and we cannot wait for people to be there and experience it,” Dino said. “It’s important to us that the free stuff is so good that people would pay for it. You could fill your weekend with free stuff.”

Podcasts, Dino said, can be “very solitary”, with people often listening to them on their commute or while doing jobs in the house. But the community they build is unique, and listeners often feel like the hosts are their friends.

“We wanted to give people a chance to have a big get-together with their podcast tribe,” he said.

This weekend, Crossed Wires will take over Sheffield. It is a much larger, polished, vibrant second edition as it attempts to establish itself as an integral event in the city’s cultural calendar. And at the same time, it might just put the city on the map for podcasts, too.

Get all the latest What’s On news straight to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter here.