The auditorium of the Alexandra Palace Theatre. The theatre’s ceiling decoration, plasterwork and music hall style have great historic significance.
A vast auditorium silent for eighty years, a major event in broadcasting history, two disastrous fires and an attack by a flying bomb . . . Alexandra Palace’s story is a strange one, encompassing momentous and turbulent happenings. It may one day recapture its full lost glory.
Alexandra Palace is a landmark Victorian entertainment complex, which opened in 1875 and has lain mostly disused for much of its lifetime. While its Great Hall and West Hall are used for concerts and exhibitions, it also contains one of London’s lost theatres, once capable of seating audiences of 2,500. The last live performance to take place at the Alexandra Palace Theatre was in 1933, a musical revue starring Gracie Fields, titled The Show’s the Thing. Afterwards the seating was removed and it served as a storage area for the BBC. The theatre survives intact today, seriously dilapidated in places, but capable of being fully restored.
The auditorium of the Alexandra Palace Theatre. The theatre’s ceiling decoration, plasterwork and music hall style have great historic significance.
Over time, various parts of Alexandra Palace have served as a camp for refugees, internees and prisoners of war. Today, it hosts an ice skating rink and it has previously contained an art gallery, library and museum. It was once served by its own railway station on a branch line from Highgate and its grounds were home to London’s only horse racecourse, which closed in 1970.
The doorways to the theatre’s auditorium retain ornate plaster mouldings from 1875; the surrounding pink paintwork is from the remodelling in 1922.
The administration and funding of Alexandra Palace has been the subject of legal wrangles over recent years, with a proposal being made to sell the whole complex for commercial development incorporating a hotel. Alexandra Palace and the Palace Park were transferred to a Trust in 1900 by an Act of Parliament, which stipulated they be ‘available for the free use and recreation of the public forever’, and the trustee status is maintained under the London Borough of Haringey.
The original Alexandra Palace building of 1873 was destroyed by fire just sixteen days after it opened. It was rebuilt to a new design by its commercial owner-operator. The theatre was regularly used as a cinema from 1901 and the projection box remains in place. Despite a refurbishment of the auditorium in 1922, the theatre and Alexandra Palace itself were at low ebb when the BBC came to lease the eastern corner of the building in 1936. It was attracted by the high position of the building, which stands at almost 300 ft (90 m) elevation on Muswell Hill, and a 220 ft (67 m) lattice transmission mast was built on the south-east tower. Two banqueting rooms were converted into production studios, and the first high-definition (by the standards of the time) television broadcast was made from the studios to 400 television sets in November 1936. The BBC drew up a scheme to convert the adjoining disused theatre into a third studio, but this plan did not develop, and instead the theatre was used for years as a scenery dock. The BBC broadcast television drama and music from Alexandra Palace studios until the outbreak of the Second World War. The powerful Alexandra Palace transmitter was conscripted for electronic warfare, and used to deceive the navigational systems on German bomber aircraft. After the war, from 1956 to 1969, Alexandra Palace was the home of BBC TV news. The final BBC broadcast was for the Open University in 1981, although the antenna remains operational for local TV broadcasting and radio.
Early equipment is preserved and displayed at the site of the world’s first TV transmission.
An EMI television camera dating from the 1960s displayed in the former BBC Transmitter Hall. Early trials at Alexandra Palace determined the technical system for TV broadcasting.
In the Great Hall, a giant steam-powered organ from the master Victorian instrument builder Henry Willis was a major attraction for Alexandra Palace for the first forty years after its opening. Later, the organ had a chequered history, being vandalized by soldiers billeted in Palace awaiting demobilization at the end of the First World War. It was restored, converted to electrical power and then exposed to the elements after a V-1 flying bomb destroyed part of the roof and the rose window overhead in 1944. After years of effort to restore the instrument, it was seriously damaged by a fire which swept through the Grand Hall in 1980, although fortuitously some of the pipework was stored eleswhere at the time. Alexandra Palace itself was half destroyed, and required a seven-year long rebuild. The organ has been slowly restored.
The organ remains operational while undergoing continuing restoration.
The pipes of the mighty Willis organ survived a fire and vandalism.
The theatre and the former BBC studios in the eastern part of the building were undamaged by the fire. There have been moves during the new century to restore the theatre, with its antique wooden stage machinery in the undercroft and backstage, to full order. A Friends of the Alexandra Palace Theatre restoration group has staged events in the foyer and auditorium and found funding for limited repairs. In 2014, Lottery funding was being sought, with one idea being to renovate the theatre as a smaller space, while retaining the faded patina of the time-capsule Victorian auditorium.