Why Londoners still love Ally Pally

It was conceived as a ‘people’s palace’ – and, as it turns 150 this week, Alexandra Palace continues to fulfil this brief admirably. There is something for everyone, and it’s not too sniffy about who ‘everyone’ describes. Hence the annual mayhem around the winter darts tournament, when everywhere between Muswell Hill and Wood Green is crawling with groups of very drunk men dressed as Smurfs, monks or the cast of Scooby Doo. The Royal Opera House this isn’t.

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But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more lofty, less populist offerings. I recall when Alexandra Palace’s theatre reopened in 2018 after an £18 million restoration, it debuted with an ENO production of the lesser-known Britten opera Paul Bunyan – hardly an obvious money-spinner. And between Luke Littler and Benjamin Britten lies everything else: craft shows, dog shows, antique fairs, wellness festivals, evangelical prayer meetings. I’m told a recent knitting and stitching event was mobbed.

There’s an ice rink, a pitch and putt golf course, and a boating pond where you can hire a pedal boat shaped like a dragon. There’s the famous 5 November firework display. One summer recently, they set up a giant waterslide. There is also, reputedly, a lively dogging scene in one of the car parks – though this may be apocryphal. I’ve yet to go.

As well as the darts, they do a lively trade hosting other second-tier sports – most famously, snooker. An unimpressed Ronnie O’Sullivan denounced it last year as ‘dirty and disgusting’. I think he meant the place to play in rather than the rumoured nocturnal dogging.

A look at the events listed this month gives a flavour of just how eclectic Ally Pally routinely is: ‘make your own toy car’, the London Gay Men’s Chorus, ice hockey matches, a street food festival, a tribute show to Paris in the jazz age, Iggy Pop.

The latter, which I’m contemplating attending, is more in the vein of what has tended to draw me over the years. I’ve seen, among others, the White Stripes, the Pixies, the Chemical Brothers, Michael Kiwanuka, Fontaines D.C. I recall seeing the National there a decade or so ago, when it seemed the entire audience was bearded men in checked shirts. Then there was, during lockdown, the odd spectacle of Nick Cave playing to an empty auditorium for paid subscribers streaming at home.

Music purists knock the building’s acoustics. But give me standing at Ally Pally any day over sitting at the O2 – a venue I have been avoiding for 15 years and counting, so much do I hate its airport atmosphere.

The strangest gig I went to there was one of the most recent: Four Tet decided to do away with the tired notion of a visible performer on a stage by getting rid of the stage completely. In practice, this made the gig like being in a very, very large nightclub with all 10,000 people present wondering what was going on.

This was merely mild eccentricity, though, compared to some of the strangeness of the past. There was the ‘14 Hour Technicolour Dream’ – a shambolic extravaganza from Pink Floyd in 1967, when the whole place was seemingly on LSD. Or the apparently serious suggestion by the GLC in the late 1970s that Ally Pally should become the base of a super-stadium where both Arsenal and Spurs would be based. Great idea, lads.

Decades before that, it was used as an internment camp for German prisoners in the first world war and as an anti-Luftwaffe signal-jamming station in the second. It was also hit by a doodlebug. Admittedly, Alexandra Palace is not the easiest place to get to if you’re not local. The walk to Wood Green tube station is a long one, so the much closer overground station struggles to cope on gig nights. And the nearest pubs – the Victoria Stakes in Crouch End and the Starting Gate towards Wood Green (both named for the horse races that took place here until 1970) – can go from being completely dead to absolutely heaving in a couple of minutes flat.

But as I am local, this isn’t an issue for me. I usually go by bike. It’s a hell of a ride to get up to the top of what my cyclist friends call Le Col d’Ally Pally, but it’s worth it when you come out of a show and can freewheel practically all the way home.

It’s also a fine-looking thing, a magnificent bit of high Victoriana, with that dramatic hilltop setting, 400 feet above sea level, which makes it a striking sight from any viewing point – its trademark giant TV aerial London’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower. While the views from Ally Pally are as fine as you get anywhere in the city. And it never fails to amaze just how vast it is. It makes Battersea Power Station look diminutive.

I just wish we still had its counterpoint to the south, Crystal Palace, but that burned to the ground in 1936 – the same year Ally Pally broadcast the UK’s first television signal. And it nearly went the same way, twice. Ally Pally’s planned 1873 opening was delayed by two years because of fire, and it had it even worse in 1980, when a fire that began in an organ led to half the site being damaged, resulting in its closure for the best part of a decade.

Reputedly, the affectionate nickname was coined by Gracie Fields, whose impresario husband ran it for a spell. It certainly stuck – the formal name, Alexandra Palace, is rarely spoken aloud. I have lived beneath Ally Pally for 25 years now – and it has loomed over my life in that time, both physically as a perpetually visible monument from the lower-lying suburbs that surround it and as a cultural hotbed.

There can be few surviving Victorian enterprises which have lived up to their foundational mandate so well, even if the things that draw ‘the people’ may have evolved significantly since 1875. In those days it was pantomime and music hall. Now it’s drinking large quantities of lager while wearing fancy dress – or knitting.

In an era of civic decline, when the most ambitious enterprise to improve London has been the rebranding of a handful of train lines with more right-on names, Alexandra Palace stands as a monument to quite how much could once be achieved. And it’s still giving people what they want a century and a half on.