Alexandra Palace - History

History

The Great Northern Palace Company had been established by 1860 but was initially unable to raise financing. The building stock was acquired from the 1862 International Exhibition held the previous year in South Kensington, London. Alexandra Park was opened to the public on 23 July 1863. Originally the new building was to be named "The Palace of the People"; it was then decided the park and Palace should commemorate the new Princess of Wales, Alexandra of Denmark, who had married Prince Albert Edward, The Prince of Wales, four months earlier. However the building retained "Palace of the People" or "People's Palace" as an alternative name. In September 1865 construction of the palace commenced, but to a design different from the glass structure initially proposed by architect Owen Jones.

The palace covers some 7.5 acres (30,000 m2). In 1871 work started on a railway line to connect the site to Highgate Station. Work on both the railway and the palace was completed in 1873 and, on 24 May of that year Alexandra Palace and Park was opened. The palace was built by Lucas Brothers, who also built the Royal Albert Hall at around the same time. Sims Reeves sang on the opening day before an audience of 102,000. However, only sixteen days later a fire destroyed the palace, killing three members of staff. Only the outer walls survived. In this fire a loan Exhibition of a Collection of English Pottery and Porcelain, comprising some 4,700 items of historic and intrinsic value, was destroyed.

With typical Victorian vigour, the palace was quickly rebuilt and it reopened on 1 May 1875. The new palace contained a concert hall, art galleries, a museum, a lecture hall, a library, a banqueting room and a theatre. An open-air swimming pool was constructed at the base of the hill in the surrounding park; the pool is now long closed and little trace remains except some reeds. The grounds included a racecourse with grandstand (Alexandra Park, which closed in 1970), a Japanese village, a switchback ride, a boating lake and a nine-hole pitch-and-putt golf course. Alexandra Park Cricket and Football Club have also played within the grounds (in the middle of the old racecourse) since 1888. The Willis organ (installed in 1875, vandalised in 1918, restored and reopened in 1929) is still working, but its restoration is ongoing. In its 1929 restored form, Father Willis's masterpiece was declared by Marcel Dupré to be the finest concert-organ in Europe.

In 1900 the owners of the Palace and Park were threatening to sell them for redevelopment, but a consortium of local authorities led by Hornsey Urban District Council managed to raise enough money to purchase them just in time. By the Alexandra Park and Palace (Public Purposes) Act 1900, a charitable trust was set up; representatives of the purchasing local authorities became the trustees with the duty to keep both palace and park "available for the free use and recreation of the public forever". It is this duty that the present trustee, Haringey Council, is currently trying to overturn, protesters fear, by selling the whole palace to a commercial developer. The palace passed into the hands of the Greater London Council in 1967, with the proviso that it should be used entirely for charitable purposes, and their trusteeship was transferred to Haringey Council in 1980.

During the First World War the park was closed and the palace and grounds were used as an internment camp for German and Austrian civilians. The camp commandant was Lt. Colonel Robert Sandilands Frowd Walker until his death in May 1917.

In 1935 the trustees leased part of the palace to the BBC for use as the production and transmission centre for their new BBC Television Service. The antenna was designed by Charles Samuel Franklin of the Marconi company. The UK's and the world's first public broadcasts of high-definition television were made from this site in 1936. Two competing systems, Marconi-EMI's 405-line system and Baird's 240-line system, were installed, each with its own broadcast studio, and were transmitted on alternate weeks until the 405-line system was chosen in 1937. The palace continued as the BBC's main TV transmitting centre for London until 1956, interrupted only by World War II, when the transmitter found an alternative use jamming German bombers' navigation systems (it is said that only 25% of London raids were effective because of these transmissions). In 1944 a German doodlebug exploded just outside the organ end of the Great Hall and blew in the Rose Window, leaving the organ exposed to the elements. Between 1947 and 1948 the Ministry of Works employed a team which included architect E.T. Spashett to facilitate repairs to the building, including replacing the rose window.

In the early 1960s an outside broadcast was made from the very top of the tower, in which the first passage of a satellite across the London sky was watched and described. It continued to be used for news broadcasts until 1969, and for the Open University until the early 1980s. The antenna mast still stands, and is still used for local terrestrial television transmission, local commercial radio and DAB broadcasts. The main London television transmitter is at Crystal Palace in South London.

Early in 1980 Haringey Council took over the trusteeship of Alexandra Palace from the GLC and decided to refurbish the building. But just six months later, on 10 July during Capital Radio's Jazz Festival, a second disastrous fire started under the organ and quickly spread. It destroyed half the building. Again the outer walls survived and the eastern parts, including the theatre and the BBC TV studios and aerial mast, were saved. In this fire parts of the famous organ were destroyed, though fortunately it had been dismantled for repairs so some parts (including nearly all the pipework) were away from the building in store. Some of the damage to the palace was repaired immediately but Haringey Council overspent on the restoration, creating a £30 million deficit. It was then reopened to the public in 1988 under a new management team headed by Louis Bizat. Later the Council was severely criticised for this overspend in a report by Project Management International. This was followed by the decision of the Attorney General in 1991 that the overspending by the Council as trustee was unlawful and so could not be charged to the charity. The Council for some years did not accept this politically embarrassing finding, and instead maintained that the charity "owed" the Council £30m, charged compound interest on what it termed a "debt" (which eventually rose to a claim of some £60m), and to recoup it tried to offer the whole palace for sale - a policy their successors are still trying to carry out despite being stalled in the High Court in 2007. As of June 2008, it is still unclear whether the Council in either of its guises has agreed to write off its overspend.

An ice rink was installed in 1990. Primarily intended for public skating, it has also housed ice hockey teams including the Haringey Racers, the Haringey Greyhounds and briefly the London Racers. During the 1960s the palace housed a public roller-skating rink.

The theatre was greatly altered in the early 1920s, with the General Manager, W. J. MacQueen-Pope, spending the war reparation money on refurbishing the auditorium. He abandoned the understage machinery that produced the effects necessary in Victorian melodrama; some of the machinery is preserved, and there is a project to restore some of it to working order. After these changes, the theatre was leased by Archie Pitt, then husband of Gracie Fields, who appeared in the theatre. Fields also drew an audience of five thousand people to the Hall for a charity event. However after the BBC leased the eastern part of the palace the theatre was only used for props storage space.

In June 2004 the first performances for about seventy years took place in the theatre, first in its foyer then on 2 July in the theatre itself. Although conditions were far from ideal, the audience was able to see the potential of this very large space – originally seating 3000, it cannot currently be licensed for more than a couple of hundred. It is intended that the theatre will one day reopen, but much costly restoration will be required first. It will never again reach a seating capacity of 3000 (not least because one balcony was removed in the early part of the 20th century as a fire precaution, when films started to be shown there), but it does seem likely that a capacity of more than 1000 may one day be achieved. A major season of the theatre company Complicite was planned for 2005 but the project, which would have included some repair and access work, was cancelled due to higher-than-anticipated costs.

Plans by the current trustees, Haringey Council, to replace all the charitable uses by commercial ones by a commercial lease of the entire building, including a casino, have encountered considerable public and legal opposition, and on 5 October 2007, in the High Court, Mr Justice Sullivan granted an application by Jacob O'Callaghan, a London resident, to quash the Charity Commission's Order authorising a 125-year lease of the entire building to Firoka Ltd.