Alexandra Palace Theatre

The auditorium opened with the rebuilt palace in 1875; contemporary press accounts in The Era and the Hornsey Journal put its capacity at around 3,000 people, and the operator publishes no post-2018 capacity figure. The Historic England list description records fittings of interest dating from 1875 including a rear balcony, a large raked stage, a proscenium with niches and, below the stage, a complete set of Victorian stage machinery designed by Messrs Grieve and Son — wooden bridges, traps, pulleys and levers for scene transformations and for projecting props and actors onto the stage. During the First World War, when the whole palace was requisitioned as a Belgian refugee transit camp and then an internment camp, the theatre served as a dormitory, chapel and cinema; it later fell into disrepair and was taken over by the BBC. It reopened in 2018 after a refurbishment that deliberately consolidated it in a state of arrested decay rather than redecorating it, with a BBC Prom on 1 September 2018 as the first public performance and the official reopening on 1 December 2018.