Unveiling the Hidden Treasures of Ally Pally: London’s Iconic People’s Palace Turns 150!

The weekend weather looks good, I told Emma Dagnes, managing director of Alexandra Palace, just days before her 150th birthday party. She shuddered as she watched me scare her luck. But the forecasters were right. The sun shone throughout the last Saturday in May as Ally Pally, as she is popularly known, celebrated her anniversary open to all. On the terraces outside, high on the hill above the red brick suburbs and the expanse of London beyond, crowds lined up at the street food stalls: Wrap N Rolla, Greek Expectations and dozens more.

Inside, in the Palm Court, the Haringey Vox, a choir from London’s Alexandra Palace borough schools, was singing “Home” and “I Am Magic,” songs composed by Ty Lowe, their conductor. The choir, which does not audition and is free to join, has sung at the Royal Albert Hall and Westminster Abbey.

But it’s special for these kids to perform at the “people’s palace at the top of the hill,” says Dan Earley, head of the Haringey Music Service. “You see it from all over Haringey. You use it to orient yourself.

That Alexandra Palace has survived the century and a half since it opened on 24 May 1873, Queen Victoria’s 54th birthday, is a miracle. Named after Princess Alexandra of Denmark, wife of the future King Edward VII, it has been destroyed by fire twice, the first time just 16 days after opening. It took two years to redesign and rebuild. The second fire, in 1980, razed much of it. This time the reconstruction took eight years.

Alexandra Palace, with its concert and exhibition spaces, theater and ice rink, is a monument to Victorian ambition. The huge halls with Italianate glass and brick vaults are surrounded by a 196-acre park and a navigable lake. At 237 meters long and 38 meters high, Ally Pally is wider and taller than Buckingham Palace.

He has played his part in the dramas of the nation. During the First World War he hosted Belgian refugees and then German and Austrian internees. In World War II he again took in Belgian refugees. It was once home to the BBC, which broadcast the world’s first regular television broadcast from its corner tower in 1936. During the Second World War, with broadcasts suspended, the BBC’s Alexandra Park aerial was used to jam radio communications of the Luftwaffe.

In peacetime, Dizzy Gillespie, the Rolling Stones, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Jay-Z and many more have performed there. Ally Pally hosted the Brit Awards. It hosts the World Darts Championships and Masters Snooker.

During the Second World War the BBC antenna was used to jam Luftwaffe radio communications

And, all the while, it has been regularly on the verge of financial collapse. In 1980, after the second fire, the FT noted that Ally Pally “posed a fiendishly difficult and expensive maintenance problem for years”. Its elevation above the hubbub of the city has long made it an attractive prospect for private developers. A 1900 act of parliament presciently warned speculators, present and future, by transferring Ally Pally to a trust which was charged with keeping the palace and its grounds “available for the free use and amusement of the public for ever”.

But Ally Pally took a toll on Haringey, who took over as director from the former Greater London Council in 1980. In 1994, the Independent, under the headline “Secret Plan to Sell Ally Pally,” wrote that Haringey “is holding confidential meetings with investors whose plans include a hotel complex, a planetarium or even a casino.” The intermediary was said to be a US leisure consultant who had been assigned an Ally Pally office and allowed to examine her business records.

In 2007, a different plan for a hotel and casino was blocked by the courts because the proposed lease under which it would operate had not been properly consulted.

The coronavirus pandemic has once again cast doubt on Ally Pally’s future. While she once again contributed to the national effort, preparing meals for Londoners in need, hosting a Covid testing station and organizing socially distanced outdoor events, the loss of much of her regular income has resulted in Louise Stewart, then managing director, to tell local newspaper Ham & High that there was a “very real risk” that Ally Pally would have to shut down.

Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022 and soaring energy prices were further blows. In December, a report to the trustees warned: “Without any additional action, it does not appear that the Trust would qualify as a going concern at this stage.”

Dagnes, who started as director of sales, events and leisure in 2010 and took over as chief executive last year, says that with energy prices falling, government support continues and Ally Pally changing all its lighting to LED, installing heat pumps and monitoring its boilers, the financial pressure has eased.

Dagnes is relentlessly optimistic about the future of Ally Pally, an asset in this job. The view of London from his large office high up in the old BBC wing probably helps – the BT Tower, St Paul’s and the City, Canary Wharf and Spurs football stadium, it looks like a spaceship has landed between the terraced houses .

“It must remain true to its Victorian spirit of entertainment, wonder, creativity and culture”

With lockdowns behind her, Ally Pally is now fully occupied, she says. There is a forest school in the park for local primary schools, a creative industries raid program for older teens and young adults, and a dementia cafe. The ice rink opens at 5am for skaters and closes at 1am when the ice hockey players – Ally Pally is home to the Haringey Huskies – finish up.

The theatre, which was closed for 80 years, serving for a time as the BBC’s prop shop, reopened in 2018. The original walls have been preserved – ‘arrested decay’, Ally Pally calls it. Hosted a BBC Proms Gilbert and Sullivan concert when the building work was not yet finished.

“I got this slightly panicked call from a health and safety officer who suggested I put 600 people in hard hats and I said, ‘It’s totally fine if you can find 600 hard hats in the next five minutes.'” he went ahead without helmets.

The two old BBC studios, where asbestos had to be removed and which were to become a visitor centre, still remain closed to the public. There are plans to refurbish the entire wing, though she won’t be drawn to what it contains: “Feasibility studies, building budgets, finding funding, all of that takes time,” he says.

Before the pandemic, Ally Pally received 50% of its funding from its own businesses, with the rest coming from Haringey and other grants, including £18.8m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to refurbish its east wing. “We’re almost back to that 50/50 split, which is pretty extraordinary,” she says. Even before the BBC wing, there is still work to be done. An event space, the Sala Panorama, “actually a marquee”, needs work.

Dagnes puts the idea of ​​a hotel into her head: who wants to sleep in a room where thousands of people dance to a raucous concert in the adjoining space? The palace and grounds must remain true to their Victorian spirit, he says, “which was for entertainment, wonder, enrichment, creativity and culture. And if Ally Pally is still doing it in 10, 20, 50, 100 years, I think we’ve been good keepers.”

It’s late afternoon at the party. The AutistiX, a band of non-autistic and autistic musicians, whose drummer Saul Zur-Szpiro was the inspiration for the Netflix film I was famous, have set the stage for the park. Families sit in clusters, children roll down the hill. London is here in all its diversity. With her often traumatic past, it’s hard to imagine Ally Pally having a bright future. But while AutistiX launch into their “I Am As I Am” theme song, for now at least the sun keeps shining.

Michael Skapinker is a contributing editor at FT

Check out our latest stories first – follow along @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram