The story of London’s ‘Ally Pally’
A day at the palace
Though the Royal Albert Hall is very much the home of the Proms, recent years has seen the festival poke its nose out from its Kensington base and stage one-off ‘Proms at…’ in venues around town. This year is the turn of Alexandra Palace.
Standing proudly in leafy north London, ‘Ally Pally’, as it is affectionately known, has had something of a dramatic history. Despite burning down a matter of weeks after its opening in 1873, it was swiftly reimagined as a palace of culture, pleasure and entertainment for the people of the capital’s northern suburbs. At its heart was a lavish
The palace earned worldwide fame as the birthplace of television
theatre and one of the country’s grandest organs, modelled after the Albert Hall’s and built by the great Henry Willis. The theatre idled, though, and became a cinema in 1910, before the site served as a Belgian refugee centre during World War I. The BBC leased part of it from 1935, and the following year Ally Pally earned worldwide fame as the birthplace of television. Transmissions were interrupted by WWII, when German prisoners of war moved in, but they resumed and continued right through into the 1950s.
A £26m restoration project has seen the old theatre and Willis organ given a new lease of life this year, and you can see the results when the BBC Proms takes over for a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury starring Mary Bevan, Neal Davies and more on 1 September.