The statue of sun god Helios by T.B. Huxley-Jones; the fountain beneath will be restored.
BBC TELEVISION CENTRE, WHITE CITY
When the BBC departed Television Centre in March 2013, all the signs were this would not the mark the end of broadcasting from the iconic building. Although plans for the site cover development of a boutique hotel, 1,000 homes and leisure facilities, they also include the refurbishment of three of the TV studios beyond 2015. In the future the BBC seems certain to lease back some studios it vacated to continue making programmes there.
But March 2013 did represent the end of what was known as ‘The Television Factory’. For fifty-three years, BBC Television Centre handled drama and light entertainment, music, news presentation and sport broadcasting and housed all the technical facilities in support, from engineering and scenery construction, to dressing rooms and catering. There will never again be a single building anywhere comprehensively responsible for so much television broadcasting.
Studio TC1’s floor area and lighting rig have the capacity for opera, orchestras and Strictly Come Dancing.
Television broadcasting from Alexandra Palace between 1936 and 1939 established the BBC as TV pioneer, but that era was a kind of pre-history, almost a false start. When the BBC returned to television broadcasting after the Second World War, it knew from its experience at Alexandra Palace that purpose-built studios were essential, and wrote a requirement for a specialised building. Land for BBC Television Centre was acquired in 1949 at the old Franco-British exhibition site in Shepherd’s Bush. The scope and scale of what was destined to be the largest TV studio building in Europe required that it was planned in phases. With land use in London always at a premium, BBC Television Centre was required to be compact as possible, yet the design layout had to make provision for expansion.
Part of the vast lighting, cable and plug store.
It was a tough specification and made more difficult by being launched in an era of rationing and austerity. The first construction took place in 1950 and 1951, but a squeeze on government funding and restrictions on the licensing of scarce materials stopped work for two years. Construction restarted and the official opening of the first studio came in 1960, while work continued for years afterwards as more studios were added up to 1998.
Legend has it that architect Graham Dawbarn, who had been given a fifty-page brief by the Controller of BBC Television Service, sketched the outline of Broadcasting House on the back of an envelope based on a question mark he had doodled. The envelope and drawing certainly exist, and the postmark is December 1949, but recent research has tended to suggest this is not the first rendering. Dawbarn had designed several prewar airport terminal buildings in Modernist style, and the circular drum configuration he made for Television Centre resembles an unbuilt plan for Heathrow.
The phasing of construction meant that the scenery block was built first, then the canteen, before work started on the central ‘doughnut’ office and studio building. Television production could then start while work continued on more studios on a spur built from the main block, expanding down the tail of the question mark. This continuous construction always plagued the Television Centre, the sound of drilling causing constant headaches for producers and sound recordists. At its peak, BBC Television Centre was a vast labyrinth with eight main studios and many other production spaces. Its offices numbered in the hundreds. Many became lost trying to find their way around the building, including senior executives. By 2007 a shortfall in funding for the BBC forced the Corporation to sell Television Centre and move to Broadcasting House. It was sold to developers Stanhope in 2012.
TC1 control room desk and monitors.
Within all the expansion over the years, the circular eight-storied BBC Television Centre remained a fine building, unclassifiable, but with ‘a strong period feel’ in the words of English Heritage, scientific and futuristic in its time. A John Piper mural adorns the entrance hall; an elegant concrete cantilevered dog-leg staircase seems to hang in space. Glass mosaics are applied to the cladding of the façades. A statue of Helios stands on a slender tapered column in the courtyard. There was once a fountain, which was deemed too noisy and was shut down, but will now be restored.
This cantilevered staircase seems to hang in space in its glass tower to the south.
To describe BBC Television Centre only in architectural terms is to deny the sheer cultural power of the programmes which have made there, and to ignore the BBC itself as an institution. For many, the notion that Doctor Who or Blue Peter was created here has built a mythology which the BBC was happy to encourage.
Studio 1, for example, designated TC1 in BBC style, opened in April 1964 and was estimated at the time to be the largest single studio in Europe. Most of the BBC’s productions of Shakespeare were made here, and much opera, Play of the Month, I, Claudius, The Two Ronnies, the coverage of General Elections and frequently Blue Peter. Later its capacity came into play for Strictly Come Dancing.