1. Alexandra Palace Palm Court entrance
    Photograph: Laura Gallant for Time Out
  2. Alexandra Palace atrium
    Photograph: Laura Gallant for Time Out
  3. Alexandra Palace organ
    Photograph: Laura Gallant for Time Out
  4. Alexandra Palace murals
    Photograph: Laura Gallant for Time Out
  5. Alexandra Palace viewed from Alexandra Palace Park
    Photograph: Laura Gallant for Time Out

Alexandra Palace

  • Things to do | Cultural centres
  • Alexandra Palace
  • Recommended
Alex Sims
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Time Out says

What is it? 

There’s a reason why Alexandra Palace is known as the 'People's Palace'. Technically, it’s because it was built in response to the Crystal Palace being relocated south of the river, in order to give north Londoners something to be proud of too, but it also fits that Alexandra Palace has welcomed and entertained everyone who’s stepped through its threshold over its long 165-year history. The place itself looks out over north London from a height. Its altitude rewards casual walkers with spectacular views, and its commanding location and 190-odd acres of leafy parkland mean it's often mistaken for a magnificent palace of regal importance.

In reality, it's an offbeat arts/entertainment centre that's making a renewed bid to pull in Londoners for nights out, after decades in the doldrums. In 2018, it re-opened the massive theatre space that had been out of action for decades, giving it a makeover that left its most picturesquely crumbling bits intact. In the years since, it's offered a mix of touring large-scale plays, seated gigs, and kids' shows. The adjoining East Court is back in action too, offering an airy conservatory-like space where theatregoers can drink, mingle and take tea. These additions join the venue's existing indoor ice-skating rink, expo hall and a vast gig space where you can catch big names and the odd clubbing event.

The renovation has marked a new chapter in Ally Pally's history. Built in 1873 as a palace for the people, it has experienced bad luck including two devastating fires (the first just two weeks after it opened; the second in 1980 after it was rebuilt), years of poor funding and periods of bad management. But despite all this, Ally Pally continues to hold a spot in the heart of Londoners, and a proud place in history as the birthplace of the world's first regular public television broadcast by the BBC in 1936. There's a bonfire night every year, a boating lake, a pitch and putt course, and a deer enclosure.

Why go? 

Whether you want to saunter around the palace park, go ice skating, listen to your favourite band or check out a new theatre show, there’s something here for everyone. 

Don’t miss: 

The annual Alexandra Palace Fireworks Festival is one of the best events on the London calendar. It’s easily one of the biggest displays in town and is always themed and choreographed to music. There are also DJs, street food and a German beer hall to accompany the bangs. 

When to visit:

Times vary depending on the event. Check the website for details. 

Ticketing info: 

Free, some events are ticketed. 

Time Out tip: 

The panoramic views here stretching over London are fantastic. I always make sure I take a bit of time to enjoy them on every visit. For the best scenes wait for golden hour.

Visit the city’s best parks and green spaces and discover our guide to the very best things to do in London.

Details

Address
Alexandra Palace Way
London
N22 7AY
Transport:
Tube: Wood Green
Price:
Free
Opening hours:
Times vary dependent on event. Check the website for details
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What’s on

The Woman in Black

4 out of 5 stars
This review is of The Woman in Black’s 33-year West End run. That has now ended but it returns to London in 2025 for a stint at Alexandra Palace Theatre. It's been decades since this skillful adaptation of Susan Hill's 1983 Gothic horror story first started setting West End audience a-shiver. The Woman in Black remains perennially popular – particularly, it seems, with generally hard-to-please teenagers – which is testament to its rough-theatre appeal and the extraordinary and enduring potency, not of guts, gore or special effects, but of simple suggestion. Ageing Arthur Kipps is haunted by sinister events that befell him 30 years earlier. In an effort to exorcise his demons, he hires an actor to help him tell his story for an invited audience. As they rehearse, though, their staging itself becomes prey to supernatural visitations from the titular hatchet-faced, whip-thin, funereally garbed woman. Stephen Mallatratt's dramatisation and a deft production by Robin Herford exploit the peculiarly spooky atmosphere of an empty theatre, making us, as an audience, feel almost like spectral voyeurs. And the chills are irresistibly effective: swirling fog, a creaking rocking chair, a locked door, a pale visage looming out of the gloom. Only occasionally does the staging show its age. The projected image of the gaunt, sinister house of Kipps' tormented memory looks hopelessly cheap and crude, and a graveyard conjured with dust sheets struggles to convince, even within the low-tech...
  • Drama

Alexandra Palace Fireworks Festival

The Alexandra Palace Fireworks Festival is easily one of the biggest, baddest displays in town. And this year, it's also the spookiest, as it falls right on Halloween weekend. So that means that its cutting-edge drone show will fill the night sky with glowing ghosts, vampires, demons and witches. But it’s not just what’s going on in the sky that’s the attraction here (although, with Ally Pally’s panoramic view of London, it is a fairly big pull). Music will come from garage legends DJ Luck and MC Neat. There’s tons more to do, from ice skating and an ice disco, to Halloween ghost tours of Alexandra Palace itself, to StrEATLIFE, where you can fill up on yummy street food, cocktails and craft beer. There's also the UK's largest German beer festival in the Great Hall, where you’ll also find oompah bands and entertainment in the form of Taylor Swift tribute act, Fearlessly Taylor (Oct 31) and Dolly Parton tribute act The Dolly Show(Nov 1). What time do Alexandra Palace Fireworks start? The fireworks will begin at 9pm on Friday and 8pm on Saturday.  Tickets and prices Tickets can be purchased on Dice here for Oct 31 and here for November 1. Adult passes cost £180, with children aged 0-10 costing £6.50 or aged 11-15 at £12. Add-on tickets for activities like ice skating, the ice disco and the bier festival can also be purchased from Dice. Find more fireworks displays in London
  • Festivals

A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story

3 out of 5 stars
This review is from 2021. A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story returns in 2025 with a new cast TBA. There are currently (at least) four stage versions of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ being performed in London (not including screenings of the superlative Muppet one). The two biggest are the now-landmark production at the Old Vic, this year featuring Stephen Mangan. And then there’s this adaptation by Mark Gatiss (you know, ‘Sherlock’ etc), which premiered at Nottingham Playhouse, before heading south. And it’s good. Alexandra Palace’s ruin-lust theatre is the perfect raddled backdrop – its faded Victorian glories and pockmarked plaster chime atmospherically with the set of perilously towering wooden filing cabinets, a kind of Monument Valley to Ebenezer Scrooge’s dry record-keeping.  Paraphrasing the book’s original name (‘A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas’), Gatiss sets out his stall explicitly: this is a production that harps on the ghostly nature of the story as much as the ‘God bless us, every one’ crimbo cheer. There are genuine chills as Marley’s ghost (Gatiss himself) materialises in the corner of Scrooge’s bedchamber, before the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come do their thang. ‘His Dark Materials’-style ghouls flit among the audience, and the Spirit of CYTC is a really horrifying shrouded figure, grimly pointing Scrooge to his own corpse, burial and gravestone.   Nicholas Farrell is a robustly believable Scrooge. He’s...
  • Drama
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