Venues in Wood Green

Alexandra Palace opened on Queen Victoria’s fifty-fourth birthday in 1873, and burned down sixteen days later. It reopened in 1875 with a Henry Willis organ, then among the largest in Europe, and has spent the century and a half since being requisitioned, rebuilt and repurposed — a Belgian refugee camp and then an internment camp through the First World War, a prefabricated-housing exhibition after the Second. Winston Churchill spoke in the Great Hall in 1913, to complaints that nobody at the back could hear him.

Its second life was broadcasting. The world’s first regular high-definition public television service went out from studios in this building on 2 November 1936, and a second channel launched from here in 1964 when a power cut took out the west London studios. Its third life was music. The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream filled the Great Hall in 1967 behind Pink Floyd; The Who brought Tommy in 1969; Queen played the Crazy Tour of London in 1979. The room still programmes that way.

Today the palace and its park are run by a charitable trust. The Great Hall takes 10,250 standing across 6,426 square metres with no pillars, the West Hall 2,500, the Theatre 850 seated, and Palm Court forms the entrance to both halls. Outside, 196 acres of parkland hold a rose garden, a boating lake and a view across the whole of London. One thing to know before enquiring: the trust does not take private social bookings — no weddings, receptions, birthdays or anniversaries — and assesses every approach against its own programme.