Original subtitles

Narrator: Opened in May 1873,

Alexandra Palace was hailed as 'The People's Palace'.

Two weeks later, it burned down.

Re-built, it became famous as the first home

of BBC Television in 1936,

and the mast which transmitted the world's first

fully electronic television pictures survives.

The theatre wasn't so lucky.

Used by the BBC to store props,

it's been hidden from public view for 80 years.

Now, this sleeping beauty has been restored.

But this is no ordinary restoration.

The architects who took it on settled on a design philosophy

that said decay was part of the story...

..and should stay.

In a sense, it felt like a room that was holding its breath.

You could almost hear the echo

from the last performance when the curtain came down.

And it was just waiting for whatever was coming next.

Narrator: 'Ally Pally' is its nickname.

We know it as a Victorian 'palace for the people'

that has a great hall, an ice rink,

a home for darts and snooker championships,

of concerts by everyone from Pink Floyd to Blur,

and on its roof, visible for miles,

The mast that brought the nation

its first proper television service.

But very few in living memory remember it as a theatre.

That's because the theatre, in the East Wing,

was very soon converted to a cinema

and then given to the BBC for use as a props store

for the many productions broadcast from Alexandra Palace

between 1936 and 1969.

By that time, the theatre had been so bashed about

that it seemed to some the only option was a re-build.

Until architects Feilden Clegg Bradley came along.

The decay was a challenge in that it was about,

in a sense, the fragility of the space,

the fragility of the built fabric,

but the fragility of the character as well.

And something that came across very clearly

from us and from the clients

and we were in total agreement about this is that

what was really important about the space

was to preserve that character.

And in its fragility, it could have been quite easily destroyed

by well meaning repair or by restoration.

So, thinking about what it had to be,

London has got a lot of theatres.

It's got a lot of rooms like that

which are theatres in the West End,

but it doesn't have spaces like that with that character.

So had we erased that pattern of time and past uses,

we would have erased that very unique quality

that made the space so special.

When you're right at the early stage of a project,

there's an immediacy in what you draw

that can't be captured by CAD.

When you do a sketch and when you draw something by hand,

then there's nothing on the page which hasn't been thought about,

at least to a certain degree.

Whereas if you produce a visual,

it might be a very beautiful visual of a space.

It sort of obscures the fact that there are things in there

which haven't necessarily been thought about.

Of course, sometimes that's incredibly useful as well.

You might find something that's totally unexpected.

Be it good or, or bad.

But when you're developing those ideas initially,

there's an immediacy to drawing

which I think is absolutely essential.

Narrator: Bold is the architect who suggests to the owners

of a derelict theatre that there is beauty in decay.

Matt Somerville had to convince the powers-that-be

to go along with his idea.

The story of the theatre particularly is one of decay,

it's actually been derelict for more years

than it's been in operation as an entertainment space.

So that is the theatre's story

and therefore the arrested decay approach was,

was the only way to really truly tell its story.

It's not just a theatre.

It's the...the theatre space is part of the performance.

It's part of the experience.

And I think we've done the right thing

for the right space at the right time.

- Architecture is certainly a collaborative process

and a creation of buildings

and the building process itself relies on an enormous team.

And we are one small part of that within this office

and outside this office are dozens and then hundreds

of people by the time you get to the construction stage.

They all play a role in delivering something.

So it becomes incredibly important to have an idea,

but then to express the idea clearly

so that people understand it and buy into it

and support it and ultimately deliver it.

Narrator: With the restoration of the theatre

would come a renewal of the East Court,

built, like the rest of Alexandra Palace,

to a Victorian scale.

So Matt Somerville's design brief became wider,

and his task to fit all the bits of the jigsaw together.

Starting of course with the iconic 1936 mast.

Which sat on top, sits on top of the BBC Tower.

And this is clearly identifiable.

And from that you then have the,

the great East Court, the railway terminus space.

It has that character of the big glass house

that's right in the middle of the East Wing here.

And then the theatre is off at this end, actually not built.

But this is the theatre foyer

and this is what we called the theatre tower,

originally a story higher, but lost perhaps 40 or 50 years ago

after the, after the Second World War.

But within these spaces, much of what we were doing

is just allowing those spaces to breathe again.

So we opened them to their Victorian proportions.

The BBC during their occupation of all of the East Wing

of the palace had divided this up into little offices.

We had ceilings that stand at office ceiling heights

within rooms that were seven metres high.

Always at the palace there's this, this super scale

in getting back to that Victorian scale was such a,

an easy move, in a way,

but a move that really brought those spaces back to life

and reconnected them.

Narrator: The model helped focus minds on layout and flow.

But what would the architects find

in the real-life version of Alexandra Palace?

Built in the 1870s, it was conceived by Owen Jones,

who had been involved in The Great Exhibition of 1851,

Joseph Paxton's huge glass palace

visited by six million people while it was up,

and the South Kensington Museum

which came to be known as the V&A.

But it was the architects John Johnson and Alfred Meeson

who built Alexandra Palace.

How depressing it must have been to see their building

go up in flames two weeks after it opened.

Undaunted, Meeson, who'd previously helped

Sir Charles Barry build the new Houses of Parliament,

set to and did it all again.

Two years later, the new Alexandra Palace opened,

the one we see today.

- Alexandra Palace was one of the first entertainment palaces

built by the Victorians at a time when Victorians

were first getting their leisure time

and wanted to come out of the big smoke, as such,

and enjoy open space and promenade and be entertained

and, you know, we used to set fire to Pompeii every night as,

as part of the entertainment.

But then of course in the 1930s,

we were the home of the first television service broadcast.

And Alexandra Palace is absolutely woven

into the fabric of English heritage and culture.

Narrator: When it came to Ally Pally's theatre,

John Johnson refused to give it a fly tower.

He thought it would ruin the lines of his creation,

poking above the roof.

So, background scenes would have to come up

through the floor of the stage rather than down from above.

And here is the magic of this theatre.

the five huge lifts beneath the stage survive,

along with smaller lifts

which would propel actors onto the stage in the pantomimes

and melodramas that Victorian audiences loved.

- What we're seeing here is five very wide lifts.

Each one as wide as the proscenium arch itself

on which scenery would have lifted out

through the stage and appeared.

And this contraption here

which is one of my favourite moments in the palace,

this is one of the star traps.

And this would have been used to fire people

eight feet through the stage.

Someone would have stood on this counter weighted platform,

quite small, and been fired out through the stage itself,

accompanied of course by a pyrotechnic puff of smoke.

And you can just imagine the nerve

it would have taken to stand on that,

hoping that the trap would open at the right moment.

Narrator: The basement of the theatre

was one of its parts that survived

the 80 year closure intact.

But, as the architects of today investigated

the rest of the building, they found a different story.

- The building we always thought showed its history very clearly.

It's had quite a tumultuous history.

It was clearly only a theatre

for the first 50 years of its, of its life.

It was a cinema.

It was a hospital and a chapel during its period

as an internment camp in the First World War.

It was the BBC's prop stores. It's been abandoned.

All of those things, I think when you come in here now,

you can read those in the physical fabric of the space

and in the character as well,

so when you look at the walls behind me,

you can see that the dereliction of the building

has left its mark on the fabric

and the cornice that used to join the ceiling

to the walls was removed in order to carry out

some fairly fundamental repairs to the,

the roof structure back in the 1980s.

Some fairly brutal interventions, really.

But in a way,

those interventions saved the fabric

and they're as much of the story of this space,

those, all of the other phases of its use.

The side corridors here were built in the 1920s,

we think partly to deal with fire regulations.

Partly perhaps to do with some poor acoustics.

The space always suffered from its inception

with quite bad acoustics.

And when you look at it,

you realise there is a much more layered character.

There's the Victorian shell.

There are the 1920s insertions,

which include the very decorative plasterwork

on the, on the ceiling as well.

So it hasn't been a static space, by any means.

It's been repaired. It's been restored.

And it's been left to deteriorate.

All of those phases have left their mark in some way.

In the end, it's that 80 years or so

of a lack of modernisation that has saved the space

that we inherited.

Narrator: In Alexandra Palace's theatre,

where to start became the question.

What to repair, what to leave, how to conserve.

It was back to the drawing board.

We started to think about

how we would characterise the approach we were taking,

the arrested decay seemed to capture it,

in that you deal with those processes of decay

or deterioration, we need to, if nothing else,

assure the medium-term future of the building.

We need to make it stable.

We need to keep the water out.

We need to stop it from getting worse.

But then we reveal that condition of the building

as a manifestation of the stories,

the history of the building, and in a way,

that history becomes legible in the surfaces of the theatre

and the other rooms within the palace.

It goes back to that very careful listening

and understanding of what you're dealing with.

Because the last thing that you want to do in a project

is to cover or obscure those qualities

which you're trying to bring out.

So everything that's added is about supporting

the heritage and the history and critically making it viable,

making it capable of being used, perhaps in entirely new ways,

or perhaps just revealing the history

or what was significant.

Narrator: The architect Matt Somerville

came to the Alexandra Palace project

with that useful label 'award winning'.

His work at Chedworth Roman Villa

in the Cotswolds for the National Trust

was recognised by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The Trust spent £2 million on a new conservation shelter

and visitor and education centre.

Matt: Whenever you're confronted with a side

of particular historic architectural significance,

it's a kind of a puzzle

to unpick what's significant about it,

what's supporting that message,

what is conflicting with the message

or what's detracting from its significance.

So it becomes a disassociation of those layers

to determine which ones we want to reveal,

which ones you want to repress,

and then that informs how you then put something

on top of that to then enhance what you want people

to understand about that particular place.

Narrator: Matt Somerville was walking in the footsteps

of the last people to have a go

at protecting this important site...

..the Victorians.

We described our approach there as being one of,

having a building that was silent,

because we wanted the archaeology to be

the star of the, of the show.

And that was very much about taking a step back

and doing something which isn't trying to be

in the, in the limelight.

Narrator: Chedworth was opened in 2012

and won an RIBA National award the following year.

Today, Matt Somerville, who's based in Bath,

is involved in a £5 million project to create

a World Heritage Visitor Centre in a building

alongside the Roman Baths that once housed the city laundry.

And, a bit like the Alexandra Palace theatre,

had been all but forgotten.

And you wouldn't think there would be neglect

in the centre of Bath,

but certainly neglected in terms of their public visibility.

This complex of industrial buildings, really,

that supported the Victorian spa and bringing those back to use

as being a way of breathing new life into those buildings.

And again, we've managed to do that

with relatively little intervention

but with key additions just to give the signal

that there's something new and that some things change

and that they're welcoming the public

in a way that's never happened in their history before.

Narrator: In between the Roman Villa at Chedworth

and the Roman Baths in Bath,

Matt Somerville gave six years of his life to Alexandra Palace.

He not only knows the train line

between Bath and London intimately,

he also knows every nook and cranny of the People's Palace.

Sitting in the theatre that he has come to regard as his baby,

Matt Somerville reflects on the challenges

he and the team from Feilden Clegg Bradley faced

adapting a Victorian theatre into a modern performance space.

One that would give theatre companies

the flexibility they required, comply with fire regulations,

but retain the character of John Johnson's creation.

The approach we adopted was, in a sense,

to change everything in that the space had to work

in ways that were never anticipated

by its original designers.

But at the same time, we wanted people

to have the same reaction and the same experience

of the space that we had when we first went in.

I talked before about that wow moment,

when you walk into the room.

And if people walk into that space now

and don't have that reaction,

then we'd consider that to be a failure.

So we had to work around, almost surgically,

work around some very fragile, very precious fabric

and carry out some fairly major interventions.

The largest of those interventions

was the removal of the entire floor which used to slope

from the back of the auditorium down towards the stage

at the front, which was great for performances

within the stage, within the proscenium,

but of course what it doesn't allow is more flexibility

to bring performances out into the auditorium

in a way that's flexible and variable.

So we removed the sloping floor

and put in a new flat floor,

and then we re-laid the Victorian boards

very carefully back on top of the new surface.

And to support that with the performance happening

out in the middle of the auditorium

rather than through the proscenium, we had to,

in effect, rebuild the circle balcony

to a much steeper rake directly above the original.

And then having brought the performance out

into the auditorium,

we wanted to envelop that performance with the audience

and we built additional seating on the two side corridors

that had been built into the theatre in the 1920s

along the two long sides of that space.

So suddenly you have,

rather than the performance happening at one end

and everyone looking monodirectionally

at that performance,

you have the performance out in the middle.

You can do performance in the round.

You can do performances on a thrust stage,

or even on a traverse stage.

And they're surrounded now by the audience.

And it creates a space

with a much more intimate character than it had before.

Emma: One of the significant interventions was the floor.

So the floor was on a rake and we had hoped

that the sleeper walls that were under that floor

would be able to carry a new floor to flatten it and be able,

as you see today, in the auditorium,

have a flexible space.

But actually when we lifted the floor,

we discovered that the dwarf walls underneath

had been built by Victorian apprentice builders,

and therefore not quite as strong as we had hoped.

And so then we had to obviously go through

a number of planning applications

and listed building consent,

and again working very closely with our Heritage colleagues

and our conservation colleagues, we were able to come up

with a solution which allowed us to bring the space

into modern capabilities without losing that historical element.

I think that we absolutely were in a moment of time I talk about

where we had the right people with the right vision,

the motivation and the energy

to actually see a project like this through.

Because I'm sure you can appreciate

it takes an awful lot of time and commitment

well beyond the normal 9 to 5 to realise a space like this.

And you know, with our architects, FCBS,

and the extended design team, I think we really came together

as a team and we could, we could see the opportunity.

You could almost smell it.

And so people were really willing to push themselves

that little extra just to make it happen.

Narrator: In the long history of Alexandra palace,

two events stand out.

The first is the fire that destroyed everything

inside its walls two weeks after opening, in 1873.

The second is the fire that, in 1980, almost did the same.

The difference between the two blazes

is that the second spared the East Wing.

John Johnson's theatre survived

along with the famous BBC television mast.

By now, it was owned by Haringey Council

and they took on the job of restoring it after the fire.

It took eight years.

2016 - work has started on the theatre,

hidden from public view for 80 years.

The BBC props department has moved out,

and the builders have moved in.

There will be no wholesale demolition here.

Instead, a careful unpicking of the fabric,

a long process filled with decisions

about what can be kept, what can be let go.

At first, it resembles an archaeological dig

more than a restoration.

There are hints at its history,

a scrap of a flyer for a performance

by Fred Karno's Great Company

of Comedians, Pantomimists, Vocalists and Charming Ladies.

Peeling away layers,

the mechanics of the theatre are uncovered.

It would have been lit by gas when it first opened.

Later, electricity was added,

and the building is a study in 1920s wiring,

with later additions.

It's a revelation for the many of the tradespeople

who live within sight of the palace.

I think it's probably fair to say as well

that so many people who did work on that site

were from the local area and already had a connection

with the place, and you really got a sense of pride

with so many people involved in the making of that project.

They were contributing.

So there was a willingness, certainly,

to, to buy into that, that approach.

Narrator: Scaffolding goes up

to allow the architects and builders

to get up close and personal with part of the theatre

that may give them the most trouble...

..the ceiling.

Matt: It's effectively two different phases

of construction.

There's the flat ceiling,

which is the original Victorian structure.

It just would have had a painted, decorative scheme

in common with the rest of the palace.

It would have used the simplest materials

to the greatest possible visual effect.

The decorative scheme is 1920s, and that was actually

in very, very good condition comparatively.

But it was the flats that was failing, that was very poor.

We've got chicken wire that was nailed,

thousands of big nails into the ceiling

across the entire surface,

held in place with the wooden battens.

And initially you come into a space like this

and you think we need to take that away,

it's obscuring the reading of the historic fabric.

But it very quickly became apparent

that the more we touched on that ceiling,

given its fragility, the more we were actually going to lose.

So it became an approach of minimum intervention.

The less you intervene, the more you preserve.

And instead of intervening underneath

and taking away all of the chicken wire, well,

now we've taken it away from the elaborate mouldings,

we repaired the ceiling from above instead

in a way which is invisible from within the auditorium.

The level of detail that we went into was extraordinary.

I mean, when this entire space was filled

with the scaffold birdcage, Matt and I spent hours

up at the top of the scaffold having many debates

about how many holes we were leaving in the ceiling,

which holes we were leaving,

where the lats were going to go, where they weren't.

You know, every inch of this space has been thought through

to such a minutiae of detail,

but it was absolutely worth it for the end result.

And I think it's quite easy for people

to come into this space and say, "Oh, well, what have you done?"

But actually, I love that.

It's like this idea that we haven't really done anything.

We've just opened it up to the world once more.

Narrator: The walls of the theatre

have been knocked about over the years but they,

and most of the damage, will stay...

..even some additions made in the 1920s.

It's all part of the theatre's architectural history.

- Matt and the team that he led at FCBS

really got under the skin

of what Alexandra Palace is actually about.

Not only in the past but also for the future.

And we really wanted this space to elevate Alexandra Palace

onto a cultural landscape,

not only within London but within the UK,

that we probably haven't occupied for a very long time.

And FCBS absolutely understood that,

and that's not to say there weren't challenges

along the way, and sort of many debates

about certain elements of the project,

but we were always on the same page,

and I think that's 100% why

this has been such a successful project in the round.

One of the triumphs for me in this space

is the fact that we were able to lift the floorboards,

number them and put them down exactly as they were,

which again, you know,

just retains this atmosphere that was here originally.

Narrator: In architecture, construction is often seen

as the poor relation,

much less glamorous than the finished work.

At Ally Pally, one man saw the build in another light.

Photographer Keith Armstrong

worked for the construction company and was amazed

to discover that no-one was keeping

a visual record of the project.

He did.

In his spare time.

Every month for two years.

The result is an essay that turns decaying walls,

exposed pipes, scaffolding,

a sagging ceiling and floorboards into art.

Keith Armstrong's labour of love started life

as a possible entry in a photographic competition.

It soon took over his life.

6,000 clicks later, we have a unique portrait

of what went on behind the scenes at Alexandra Palace.

The East Wing of Alexandra Palace

is ready to receive visitors.

Where once the BBC stored outside broadcast trucks,

the graphic artists Art & Believe

have created a spectacular painted floor,

an installation artwork that you can walk on.

But what those who've lived

with Alexandra Palace all their lives,

either looking at it every day or using it,

want to see is the theatre,

that grand space whose seats would once have been filled

with 3,000 people, a secret space

now recovered from dereliction.

First in are the patrons.

People who supported this £27 million restoration.

What would they think of the 'arrested decay'?

I think some people who had been bought their donations

who had not necessarily bought into the project

personally themselves,

took a little bit of explanation.

Did we do it this way because there wasn't enough budget?

Did we do it this way because we ran out of budget?

But no.

It was always the intention and most can be persuaded

that, for some traditionalists who like the pastiche approach,

it will always be difficult to get.

Narrator: Among the first productions

in what's being called 'London's Newest Old Theatre'

is Shakespeare's Richard III,

whose staging masks the original proscenium arch.

But this just demonstrates the flexibility

of the new design, with its thrust stage

and the ability to stage performances in the round.

I was lucky enough to go along to performances

in the first week that the theatre reopened,

and just to feel that space suddenly alive.

I mean, that's what it was waiting for all of that time.

There were hundreds of people in there.

It was filled with music and applause,

and that's when that, I mean, that really becomes tangible.

That's when you appreciate that

that's what the building should be doing

and that's how the building's received and being used.

Narrator: New audiences may find as much interest around them

as in front of them.

They could be sitting next to a hole in the dress circle,

or an apparently crumbling wall.

Matt: That patina that those decades have left

on the fabric of the building, it felt really important in here

not to take away the character that makes a space unique.

And we've seen, actually, photographs

from the 1920s restoration which make it look perfect.

But also strangely characterless.

And what the space now tells beyond that period of,

of repair is a story which is a story of its use

as a theatre, it's falling out of use,

it's used as a prop store, and that period of neglect.

And that is something that just becomes tangible

when you stand in here,

when you get up close to the fabric

and you can see it's clearly, it's clearly not perfect.

But that expresses something about the story of the building,

the history of the building is legible

in all of these surfaces.

Narrator: Lighting rigs have been installed,

a lighting control gallery created above the remains

of the projection box from the theatre's days as a cinema,

and the ceiling has been ingeniously held together.

And there is, at the front of the dress circle,

a microcosm of this unusual restoration.

Looking at the fabric here,

we've got the Victorian flounce

and the curving plaster of the circle balcony.

We've got applied elements,

the applied decorative plaster elements from the 1920s.

And then even looking behind

where this one has been removed here,

we can see if we look very closely,

an element of the Victorian painted scheme.

And then even in light pencil, the initials,

probably of the person who put the plaster element

over the top of that.

So it tells a story of how the space has been treated.

And again, rather than peeling those away, they're just left.

Narrator: The arrested decay has become a talking point.

In covering the opening, the BBC's Arts Editor,

Will Gompertz, labels it a triumph,

gives it five stars and calls it

'shabby chic taken to an entirely new level.'

Entering the theatre was, he said,

so romantic that it was not so much

like stepping back in time as walking into a novel.

- It really is quite wonderful.

I think it still takes my breath away, actually,

every time I come in here,

even though I've been in here a lot obviously

over the time of the project.

I think what really we enjoy is also seeing audiences

coming into the space and they have this gasp of excitement,

sort of like they're urban explorers having found

this hidden gem that's been lost for generations.

And this was a one-shot wonder.

We did not have the opportunity to fail.

It had to be a success.

Because it's so important for the future

of Alexandra Palace that it was.

The performances in the theatre

have been amazing and the feedback to the East Court

and the theatre has just been wonderful.

One of my favourite moments of the whole project

was when we opened the doors to the public

and they came in and they loved it.

And the buzz in this space

is exactly what the palace was made for.

For the public, for their enjoyment.

- It's a massive privilege.

It's an enormous responsibility, as well.

I think it's probably fair to say that in a lifetime,

though, there aren't that many projects like Ally Pally.

I know there will never be anything

quite like Ally Pally again.

It's, it's truly unique.

And there aren't many buildings

about which you can genuinely say they're an icon,

but Ally Pally certainly is an icon.

[applause in background]

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv