The pages dedicated to the restoration of The Historic BBC Studios have been given a different treatment - not only to show the boundary between old and new material but also to accommodate the different context in which we view the studios.

The Victorian Theatre and The East Court to a degree have somehow been in suspended animation for the past eighty years.

The Historic BBC Studios had been working studios for most of the first forty of those years.

The books concentrates on the then and the now to set the context of the theatre and east court.

While for The Historic BBC studios, it was about setting the BBCs tenure at Alexandra Palace within the context of a longer timeline stretching back from the Open University's use of the studios in the 1980's back to the trials of the Baird and Marconi-EMI equipment to decide which technology would eventually define not just the technology used in the first decades of television but also how the technologies of today have been determined by those pioneering days.

And yet the history of the Southeast Wing of the palace stretches back another 60 years, with very little of the spaces that were repurposed as studios, control rooms and transmission halls still visible.

Its comparable to evolution - places without function get mothballed - like the theatre. While spaces that remain in use do so because the evolve and change.

The Robert Elms Show

BBC Radio London - Tuesday 27 November @ 10:15