Alexandra Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexandra Palace, known to Londoners as Ally Pally, opened on the 24th of May 1873 on a ridge in north London. The singer Sims Reeves performed on that first day, and 102,000 people came to listen. Sixteen days later, a fire had destroyed the building. That should have been the end of the story. Instead the palace was rebuilt and went on to host a pioneering television service, a wartime camp, rock legends and a world darts final. Who imagined a palace for ordinary people in the first place? How did a Victorian pleasure ground end up at the heart of broadcasting history? And who gets to decide the fate of a building that was promised to the public forever?

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• 2. The Palace of the People

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  The idea came from the designer Owen Jones, who in 1859 conceived a "Palace of the People" for the north of London. His Great Northern Palace Company existed by 1860, but at first it could not raise the money to build anything.

  The breakthrough came from demolition. The huge International Exhibition building of 1862 in South Kensington was being pulled down after the government declined to take it over, and its materials were salvaged for the new project. In 1863 a company called Alexandra Park Co. Ltd. bought the land of Tottenham Wood Farm. The plan was to turn it into a park and to build the palace on a ridge more than 300 feet high, part of Muswell Hill. The park opened to the public on the 23rd of July 1863.

  The name came from a royal wedding. On the 10th of March 1863, Alexandra of Denmark married Prince Albert Edward, the future King Edward VII, and she became the popular new Princess of Wales. The park and the planned building were renamed in her honour, though "The People's Palace" stayed in use as an alternative name.

  Construction began in September 1865. Jones's original idea was a glass structure, but the design that was built came from John Johnson and Alfred Meeson. A railway called the Edgware, Highgate and London Railway was started in 1871 to link the site to Highgate station. The builders were Kelk and Lucas, who were putting up the Royal Albert Hall at around the same time. The finished palace covered some 7.5 acres.

  The fire that followed the opening killed three members of staff. Only the outer walls survived. Also lost was a loan exhibition of English pottery and porcelain, comprising about 4,700 items. Johnson himself oversaw the rebuilding, and the palace reopened on the 1st of May 1875.

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• 3. Amusements and Illusions

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  The palace that reopened in 1875 was a whole day out under one roof. It held a concert hall, art galleries, a museum, a lecture hall, a library, a banqueting room and a large theatre.

  The theatre stage was fitted with machinery for the pantomimes and melodramas that audiences loved. Performers could vanish, reappear, or be flung into the air. The same theatre also hosted political meetings.

  Outside, the grounds offered even more. The Alexandra Park Racecourse, laid out with a grandstand, was nicknamed the "Frying Pan" or the "Pan Handle" after the shape of its track. From 1868 until it closed in 1970, it was the only racecourse in London. Visitors could also find a Japanese village, a switchback ride, a boating lake and a nine-hole pitch-and-putt golf course. An open-air swimming pool was built at the foot of the hill. It closed long ago, and little remains of it except some reeds. Cricket and football clubs have played in the middle of the old racecourse since 1888.

  A Henry Willis organ was installed in 1875 and was vandalised in 1918. After restoration it reopened in 1929, and the French organist Marcel Dupré called it the finest concert organ in Europe.

  The theatre changed in the early 1920s under the general manager W. J. MacQueen-Pope. He spent war reparation money on refurbishing the auditorium and abandoned the understage machinery of the Victorian melodrama. Some of it was preserved, and there is a project to bring part of it back to working order. Archie Pitt, then husband of the singer Gracie Fields, leased the theatre afterwards. Fields appeared there, and she once drew 5,000 people to the hall for a charity event.

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• 4. Held in Trust

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  By 1900 the owners of the palace and park were threatening to sell them for redevelopment. Henry Burt, a magistrate and a member of both the Middlesex County Council and Hornsey District Council, led a consortium that saw the chance to secure the site for Londoners. His committee raised enough money to buy it just in time.

  An Act of Parliament then created a charitable trust. Representatives of the purchasing local authorities became trustees, with the duty to keep the building and park "available for the free use and recreation of the public forever".

  War tested that promise quickly. During the First World War the park was closed. The palace first sheltered displaced Belgians as a refugee camp. From 1915 to 1919 it served as an internment camp for German and Austrian civilians. Its commandant, Lt. Col. R. S. F. Walker, held the post until he died in May 1917.

  In 1921 a plaque honouring Burt was put up at the entrance to the south terrace. In 1967 the palace passed to the Greater London Council, on the condition that it be used entirely for charitable purposes. Haringey council became the trustee in 1980, and its tenure began with a disaster.

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• 5. Birthplace of Television

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  In 1935 the trustees leased part of the palace to the BBC, which wanted a production and transmission centre for its new television service. Charles Samuel Franklin of the Marconi Company designed the antenna. In November 1936, the world's first regular public high-definition television broadcasts went out from the building. The system used 405 lines, and it was the first fully electronic television system in regular use. The modern coat of arms of the London Borough of Haringey carries lightning rays that allude to this achievement.

  Two rival systems competed at first. Marconi-EMI offered a 405-line system and John Logie Baird a 240-line one. Each had its own studio, and they were transmitted in alternate weeks until the 405-line system won in January 1937. The BBC then built brick infills in the colonnade to form its studios, while the theatre became a store for props. Studios A and B still survive in the southeast wing with their producers' galleries, and they now display historic television equipment.

  The Second World War interrupted broadcasting. The transmitter was put to a different use, jamming the navigation systems of German bombers. In 1944 a flying bomb exploded just outside the organ end of the Great Hall and blew in the Rose Window, leaving the organ exposed to the weather. In 1947 the architect E. T. Spashett used pieces of the shattered window in a new design.

  The palace remained the BBC's main London transmitting centre until 1956. In the early 1960s an outside broadcast from the top of the tower let viewers watch and hear a description of the first satellite passing across the London sky. BBC News was still broadcast from the building until 1969, and Open University programmes until 1981. The main London television transmitter is now at Crystal Palace in South London, but the antenna mast at Alexandra Palace still carries local terrestrial television, local commercial radio and Digital Audio Broadcasting.

  The 405-line system finally closed in January 1985-49 years after it began there. One week later, the Sinclair C5 battery electric vehicle was launched at the same building.

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• 6. Fire and Debt

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  In 1977 the Greater London Council weighed a £20 million plan to turn Alexandra Park into a multi-sport complex. Its centrepiece was to be a 75,000-seat football ground shared by Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur. It would have needed a monorail or a branch of the Piccadilly line, plus private funding. Local people objected, citing the risk of hooliganism, and the council rejected the plan.

  Early in 1980, Haringey Council took over as trustee and insured the building for £31 million, intending to refurbish it. Six months later, during Capital Radio's Jazz Festival, a fire began under the organ. It spread quickly and destroyed half of the palace, including the Great Hall, the Banqueting Suite, the dressing rooms and the ice rink. Again the outer walls held. The eastern parts, including the theatre, the BBC studios and the mast, were saved. The organ had been dismantled for repairs, so nearly all of its pipework was in storage elsewhere.

  Restoration created a new problem. Haringey overspent and left a £30 million deficit. The palace reopened to the public in 1988 under a management team headed by Louis Bizat. A report by Project Management International later sharply criticised the council for the overspend. In 1991 the Attorney General stated that the overspending by the council as trustee was unlawful and could not be charged to the charity.

  For some years the council did not accept this. It insisted that the charity owed it £30 million and charged compound interest on the supposed debt. Its claim eventually rose to some £60 million, and to recover the money it tried to offer the whole palace for sale.

  One piece of the rebuilding did succeed. An ice rink was installed in 1990, mainly for public skating. It has also been home to the ice hockey teams the Harringay Racers, the Haringey Greyhounds and the London Racers, and now the Haringey Huskies.

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• 7. Rescue and Restoration

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  In 1996 the palace became a listed building, after campaigning by the Hornsey Historical Society. That protection did not end the threats. A planned commercial scheme would have turned the site into a mixed leisure complex with a hotel, a replacement ice rink, a cinema, a ten-pin bowling alley and an exhibition centre. Public groups opposed it, and the High Court blocked it in 2007.

  Another plan from Haringey Council would have replaced all the charitable uses with commercial ones, including a casino. On the 5th of October 2007, Mr Justice Sullivan granted an application by a London resident, Jacob O'Callaghan. The court quashed the Charity Commission's order authorising a 125-year lease of the entire building to Firoka Ltd.

  Meanwhile the abandoned theatre had begun to stir. In June 2004 the first performances in about 70 years took place in its foyer, and in July they moved into the theatre itself. Conditions were far from ideal, but audiences could see how large and promising the space was. It once held 3,000 seats, yet it could be licensed for only a couple of hundred. One balcony had been removed in the early 20th century as a fire precaution when films began to be shown there. A season by the theatre company Complicité planned for 2005 was cancelled because costs came in higher than expected.

  In September 2009 the main hall was permitted to hold 2,000 more people, bringing its limit to 10,250. Even so, the palace was described as burdened by a £37 million debt owed to Haringey Council.

  A masterplan drawn up in 2012 set out six "big ideas" for restoring and redeveloping the palace. The first to go ahead targeted the derelict eastern end. The aim was to open up the Victorian theatre and the historic BBC studios. In 2013 the Heritage Lottery Fund gave a Round 1 pass to proposals for a new entrance in the restored East Court, a flexible theatre and a visitor attraction in the studios. Some people objected to demolishing the brick infills the BBC had built in the colonnade. After a public consultation and advice from English Heritage, consent was granted, and in March 2015 the fund awarded major Round 2 grant funding.

  In 2018 Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios completed a £27 million refurbishment of the theatre and east wing, with Willmott Dixon as contractor. The theatre hosted a BBC Proms performance on the 1st of September 2018 and officially reopened to the public on the 1st of December 2018. Its opening programme included Dylan Moran, Horrible Histories, Gilbert & George, Gareth Malone and an evening of jazz presented by Ronnie Scott's. The theatre and its stage structure remain on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register.

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• 8. A Venue for Everything

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  In April 1967 the International Times organised a benefit called the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream. It showed how fast the underground scene was growing and was then the largest indoor event of its kind. Pink Floyd headlined, with the Pretty Things, Savoy Brown, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, The Move and others. John Lennon attended, and Yoko Ono presented her performance work "Cut Piece".

  Earlier in the decade, The Observer's Wildlife Exhibition of 1963 drew 46,000 visitors and raised awareness of endangered species worldwide. In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin played two sell-out nights in the Grand Hall on the 22nd and the 23rd of December 1972. Tickets cost £1 each and were sold only at certain Harlequin Record Shops in central London. The Grateful Dead played three shows from the 9th to the 11th of September 1974, and portions of all three were released in March 1997 in the Dick's Picks series.

  Film crews used the palace too. In 1970 the Italian director Lucio Fulci filmed part of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin there, with the palace standing in for a disused church. After the 1980 fire, the burnt-out Great Hall became Victory Square in Michael Radford's 1984 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The 1990s brought Blur's major concert of October 1994 to promote Parklife, released on video in February 1995 as Showtime. The Brit Awards were held at the palace from 1993 to 1995, and the MTV Europe Music Awards came in November 1996.

  Sport and spectacle filled the other months. The News of the World Darts Championship final stage was held there from 1963 to 1977. The PDC World Darts Championship moved in from the Circus Tavern in Purfleet in December 2007, after 14 years there. The Masters snooker tournament has been held every January since 2012, apart from 2021. In August 2000, more than 4,000 competitors took part in the fourth Mind Sports Olympiad.

  Some events turned strange. In June 2007 a Hackday run by the BBC and Yahoo! was interrupted when lightning struck the building. The fire vents opened and then stuck open, and it rained inside. The Miss World 2002 pageant was staged there in December 2002. The funeral of the Labour MP Bernie Grant in April 2000 drew an estimated 3,000 people.

  Recent years have kept the range wide. Björk performed one of the last shows of her Biophilia tour in September 2013, and it was the first concert in the round at the palace. In June 2020, Nick Cave recorded Idiot Prayer in the West Hall, performing songs from across his career alone at the piano. The Earthshot Prizes were presented there on the 17th of October 2021. During the coronavirus pandemic, Edible London used the palace as a food distribution hub for local residents. The park became a local nature reserve in 2013.

  Every November a large fireworks display is scheduled on the hill as part of London's Bonfire Night celebrations.

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