Eventually in 1985 the BBC acquired the land and, in partnership with a developer it was pulled down as can be seen left (picture taken from BBC East Tower). Eventually a nick name came into common usage: White City.Īfter the games was over the temporary buildings were scrapped and little proper use was made of the stadium and so it was given over to a dog-track for decades. Of course again many of the buildings were temporary painted white. The site of the Great Exhibition lay dormant and so here the ground was properly drained and an olympic village was constructed. It wasn’t until 1908 that Britain hosted an olympiad as we know it today. It is not well known that in order to spur his pupils in athletic excellence the games master of a school in Much Wenlock (some sources I’ve read say Ludlow), Dr William Penny Brookes, decided to hold his own mini olympic games in October 1850. In those days video synchronisers hadn’t been invented and so his solution served the double purpose. He needed order, both to quickly service any issue in each studio, but also to enable the timing of video signals from each studio to arrive at one point at exactly the same moment so studios could collaborate to the same programme at the same time. I’ve no doubt that he’d been briefed to put some technical issues in the back of his mind as well.
He looked at the question mark and in a flash of inspiration realised that this would make the perfect design. How could he design a centre with eight studios, production galleries, dressing rooms, camera workshops, recording areas and offices to support them? It must also allow trucks onto the site with the sets and areas for audiences and guests that were separate from the trucks. He then drew a question mark in the middle. He sat down, pulled out an old envelope and drew the triangular shape of the site on the back. It is said by Wikipaedia that when the designer, Graham Dawbarn, first looked at the site he was stuck for ideas and went to a local pub. The shape of the main building has been subject of much speculation. During the early 1950‘s work intermittently progressed on the peripheral buildings then, on 24 August 1956, the contract for the central construction was awarded to Higgs and Hill and the foundation stone was laid.
It was planned to cover 6 acres although this eventually grew to 14. The idea was to build the largest television complex in the world at a cost of £9M. Whilst the dogs still raced up the road on Friday 1 April 1949, Norman Collins, the then Controller of the BBC Television Service, announced at the Television Society's annual dinner that the BBC would embark on a new grand project.
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