A 19th Century bottle and an old-school BBC mug are among the curious finds at Alexandra Palace, writes Taro Kaneko

The Lipton bottle (inset left) and BBC mug (inset right) discovered at Ally Pally

Major renovation work at Alexandra Palace has uncovered a number of long-lost items with some dating back nearly 150 years.

Workers on the north-east office building have found a Lipton’s drink bottle from the 19th Century, a BBC coffee cup from the 1980s and a mysterious wooden shoe.

The Lipton’s drink bottle dates to approximately 1878. The BBC coffee cup is speculated to be from the educational programmes broadcasted by the Open University production unit that used the palace’s TV studios between 1971 and 1981.

The restoration project at the palace began in February at a currently hidden and inaccessible area of the venue, and is now nearing completion. Historic England provided a grant of £550,000 to support the work. However, the scale and complexity of the repairs – with some of the internal walls found to be no longer in fit condition – led to an additional £195,000 grant to support it.

Already, new timber floors, walls and roof coverings have been installed. The office building began its use in 1875, to house the ‘offices of the administrators’, a ticket office, porter’s facilities, costume room, and the palace’s first superintendent. It served finally as an office space for the Open University before becoming disused.

The proportion of the palace that remains out of use has so far been reduced from 40% to 29%, following the successful reopening of the Victorian theatre in 2018 after 80 years of its closure.

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