Haringey Uncovered: Alexandra Palace

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ALEXANDRA The

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PALACE

People’s

Palace

THE PREFAB PALACE Alexandra Palace was never a Royal palace. No kings or queens ever lived there, and it never belonged to a handsome prince (but it was named after a princess - Princess Alexandra of Denmark). Instead, Alexandra Palace was a palace for the people.

It was built at a time when Britain was leading the Industrial Revolution, and desperate to let the world know it. The Great Exhibition in 1851 was a showcase of technology and industry, and was held in Hyde Park in the Crystal Palace, a glass building that was so big, it covered fully grown trees.

In 1863 the massive Tottenham Wood Farm, had been bought and turned into Alexandra Park. On one of London’s tallest hills, and surrounded by fields and pastures, it was a perfect place for a rival to the Crystal Palace, which had been moved to South London.

Alexandra Palace was actually built out of another building, the 1862 International Exhibition building which had stood in South Kensington where the Natural History Museum is now. After failing to make any money it was torn down, and anything that could be moved was taken piece by piece to Alexandra Park.

The Palace opened on 24 May 1873 Queen Victoria’s birthday. It was visited by 120,000 people in just two weeks, but only 16 days after it opened, it burnt to the ground.

The Palace was quickly rebuilt (using some of the original 1862 International Exhibition building), and reopened on 1 May 1875. A week later 94,000 people came in one day. This time, the Palace had its own fire brigade station and the towers on each corner contained 16,000 gallon water tanks, just in case.

DID YOU KNOW...

Princess Alexandra married King Edward VII and became the Empress of India, the Queen Mother and the longest serving Princess of Wales.

DID YOU KNOW...

Tottenham Wood Farm was built in 1789, and the portico of the farmhouse still stands on Rhodes Avenue, near Alexandra Park School. It was owned by the great uncle of Cecil Rhodes, who colonised Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), controlled 90% of the world’s diamonds, and formed a secret society to put the whole world under British rule. His uncle simply wanted 1000 cows on his farm, but never managed it.

THE CURSE According to a spooky legend, an old woman who was evicted when the Palace was built put a curse on the Palace. Since then it has struggled to make a profit, run up huge debts and things just keep burning down: in 1897, it was a reconstructed Japanese village; in 1898, a large Swiss chalet; in 1971, a banqueting hall; and in 1980, even the water tanks couldn’t stop the whole Palace burning to the ground for a second time.

Alexandra Palace was like a 19th century Thorpe Park. It had a gymnasium, a zoo, three lakes, an open-air swimming pool, tennis courts, a funfair, the country’s biggest organ and revolutionary flush lavatories! It hosted everything from tea-pot making exhibitions to lion feeding. There were fetes, concerts, flower shows, operas, festivals, circuses, kite flying, parachute jumping from a balloon, open-air musicals, firework displays, horse races, cricket matches, elephants roaming on the grounds, and displays of all the wonders of the Industrial Revolution.

It might have been meant as a palace for the people, but its real problem was that the Industrial Revolution made the people poor. Victorian England was where sweatshops were invented; where factories employed children because they were cheaper than adults; and where people worked up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. There was massive unemployment in London and up to a third of people lived in poverty.

Those people who were doing well - the factory managers, doctors, shopkeepers, and architects - were moving out of the city into new suburbs like Holloway or Wood Green. The houses they left behind became London’s slums, where several families shared a single house.

Although the six bank holidays created

by Parliament in 1871 might have given people more time to visit Alexandra Palace, apart from the middle class doctors, shopkeepers, lawyers, and architects, who could afford to go?

DID YOU KNOW...

London’s population reached an all time high in 1936, at 8.6 million people.

DID YOU KNOW...

In 1902 the Palace opened a velodrome - an indoor cycling track. The nearest other one was in Madison Square Garden in New York.

DID YOU KNOW...

Alexandra Palace wasn’t the only big project to go up in smoke: the Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936.

WAR ON TV In 1936, the first high definition television programme was broadcast by the BBC from the south-east tower of Alexandra Palace. Although TV would one day be available to almost everyone, in 1936 there were only about 2,000 televisions in Britain, and they each cost about as much as a small car.

The BBC had been broadcasting television since 1928 using John Logie Baird’s early system. But the BBC’s new studio in Alexandra Palace used Baird’s improved high definition system, and the Marconi/EMI system that eventually became the BBC’s first choice.

Although the early television service lasted just two hours a day and had a broadcasting range of only 25 miles, by 1939, 20,000 viewers were already hooked. But on 1 September 1939, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, the television service was deemed a luxury the nation couldn’t afford, and it was suspended.

Television manufacturing facilities were converted to make radio and radar equipment, many of the BBC’s engineers joined the war effort, in particular the radar programme, and the transmitter on the south-east tower of Alexandra Palace was retuned and used to jam the Nazi bombers’ navigation frequencies, causing bombs to drop harmlessly at sea, and in Kent.

The TV studios at Alexandra Palace were reopened six years later after the war, and according to showbiz legend, the BBC resumed transmission right at the same point in the Mickey Mouse cartoon where it had stopped in 1939.

Jasmine Bligh came on air and said ‘Sorry for the interruption of our programme service. Our next presentation is...’ as if nothing had happened.

Alexandra Palace was the home of the BBC until the early 1950s and remained in use until the late 1970s.

DID YOU KNOW...

John Logie Baird’s first television studios were in the south tower of Alexandra Palace’s big rival the Crystal Palace.

DID YOU KNOW...

Baird might have lost the TV war, but he probably invented radar and so helped win World War II.

DID YOU KNOW...

Alexandra Palace was going to be part of the Northern Line.

Most of the work had been done, but after World War II the idea was abandoned.

This booklet was produced by young people at Exposure, Haringey’s award-winning youth media charity, with help from BTCV, Bruce Castle Museum (Haringey Libraries, Archives & Museum Service) and Friends of Queen’s Wood. It was paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Produced by

020 8883 0260

Siobhan Renshaw

Nick May

Sinead Clinton

Benita Nantume

Rohan Chummun

Llewellyn Harrigan

Harry Yeates

The following young people took part in this project: