Alexandra Palace

The Palace of the People was conceived by Owen Jones in 1859, and the Great Northern Palace Company, established by 1860, at first failed to raise the money to build it. In 1863 Alexandra Park Co. Ltd bought the land of Tottenham Wood Farm on Muswell Hill, and the park opened to the public on 23 July 1863.

Palace and park alike were renamed for Alexandra of Denmark, the new Princess of Wales, who had married the future Edward VII on 10 March 1863. Construction began in September 1865, to a design by John Johnson and Alfred Meeson rather than the glass structure Jones had first proposed, and was carried out by Kelk and Lucas, then also building the Royal Albert Hall. Alexandra Palace and Park opened on 24 May 1873, with Sims Reeves singing before an audience of 102,000.

Sixteen days after the opening a fire destroyed the palace and killed three members of staff. Only the outer walls survived. A loan exhibition of English pottery and porcelain, some 4,700 items, burned with the building.

Rebuilt at speed, the palace reopened on 1 May 1875 with a concert hall, art galleries, a museum, a banqueting room and a large theatre whose stage machinery let performers disappear, reappear and be propelled into the air for Victorian pantomime and melodrama. A Henry Willis organ was installed in 1875, vandalised in 1918, and restored and reopened in 1929. The grounds held Alexandra Park Racecourse, London's only racecourse from 1868 until it closed in 1970.

In 1900 the owners threatened to sell palace and park for redevelopment. A consortium headed by Henry Burt JP, of Middlesex County Council and Hornsey District Council, raised the purchase money in time, and the Alexandra Park and Palace (Public Purposes) Act 1900 created a charitable trust whose trustees were bound to keep both “available for the free use and recreation of the public forever”.

The park was closed during the First World War. The palace and its grounds were used first as a refugee camp for displaced Belgians, and then from 1915 to 1919 as an internment camp for German and Austrian civilians. The camp commandant, Lt Col R. S. F. Walker, held the post until his death in May 1917.

In 1935 the trustees leased part of the palace to the BBC as the production and transmission centre for its new television service, with an antenna designed by Charles Samuel Franklin of the Marconi Company. The world's first public broadcasts of what was then called high-definition television went out from the palace in November 1936. Marconi-EMI's 405-line system and John Logie Baird's 240-line system were each installed with their own studio and transmitted on alternate weeks until the 405-line system was chosen in January 1937.

The palace served as the BBC's main London transmitting centre until 1956, interrupted by the Second World War, when the transmitter was used to jam German bombers' navigation systems. In 1944 a doodlebug exploded just outside the organ end of the Great Hall and blew in the rose window, leaving the organ exposed to the weather; some of the shattered glass was worked into a new design by the architect E. T. Spashett in 1947. BBC News broadcast from the building until 1969 and the Open University until 1981, and the mast still carries local terrestrial television and radio.

Haringey Council took over the trusteeship early in 1980. On the afternoon of 10 July an accidental fire started under the organ and destroyed half the palace, taking the Great Hall, the banqueting suite and the ice rink; the eastern parts, including the theatre, the BBC studios and the mast, were saved. The palace reopened to the public in 1988. Haringey overspent on the restoration by some £30 million, and in 1991 the Attorney General stated that the overspending could not lawfully be charged to the charity.

The building was listed Grade II in 1996, at the instigation of the Hornsey Historical Society. On 5 October 2007 the High Court quashed the Charity Commission order authorising a 125-year lease of the entire building to a commercial operator, on an application by a London resident, Jacob O'Callaghan. The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded major grant funding in March 2015. In 2018 Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios carried out a £27 million refurbishment of the theatre and east wing, and the Victorian theatre reopened to the public on 1 December 2018. Haringey remains the trustee, and the Great Hall and West Hall are run for exhibitions, concerts and conferences by the trading arm of the charitable trust.