Live from W12, it's the Television Centre Comedy Comeback

How London's most famous doughnut went from a BBC farewell to the home of SNL UK, picking up a few luxury penthouses along the way.

West London once answered the question ‘what should we build here’ with a literal question mark. Architect Graham Dawbarn sketched the shape, shrugged, and then watched everyone take him seriously. This doodle became the Television Centre in White City. And for sixty years, more or less, the entire nation grew up inside it.

Doctor Who's TARDIS made its home here, returning again and again, some would say suspiciously often for an alien with all of time and space to explore. Blue Peter's garden. Basil Fawlty's hotel. Morecambe and Wise's Christmas special, watched by twenty-eight million people. Nearly half the country. Just imagine January if you’d missed that.

Essentially, if your childhood had a soundtrack, the BBC recorded it in W12.

This Saturday, the comedy lights come back on. SNL UK premieres at Television Centre, hosted by Tina Fey. And if you happen to live there, your commute to the most exciting night in British comedy is …the lift.

2013: The closing of the
Dream Factory

When the BBC announced it was leaving Television Centre, the reaction was roughly what you'd expect from the British public when confronted with the imminent loss of something beloved: mild outrage, vehement letters, and an explosion of tutting. Management, admirably unsentimental, called the building an "analogue dinosaur." The staff, slightly more sentimentally, unscrewed the toilet signs from the walls.

This is not a joke. In the final days before the move, BBC employees were documented removing door handles, signage, and various fixtures as keepsakes.

Madness played in the car park (the band, Madness, that is). Frontman Suggs stood in front of the question-mark building he'd grown up watching on Saturday mornings and waved goodbye. Adults, professional television people, cried in a car park in W12. If you didn't feel something, well, maybe you watched ITV.

The Television Centre went quiet. The question mark stood. And London, being London, carried on as usual.

Sometimes London doesn't ‘preserve’ history,
it just keeps using it.

There is a third-century Roman temple underneath the Bloomberg headquarters on Queen Victoria Street. The Temple of Mithras, a place of ancient mystery cult worship, older than the idea of England itself, sits in a purpose-built underground museum beneath one of the most expensive office buildings in the City. You can visit it for free, Tuesday to Saturday. Bloomberg built their entire European HQ around it, because in London, that is kind of what you do.

It's just not unususal here. London doesn't cordon its history off behind velvet ropes. It stacks everything on top of everything else and gets on with it. A Victorian pub next to a glass tower next to a Georgian terrace next to a brutalist car park. Nobody needs to explain it and nobody finds it particularly strange. That's just what two thousand years of continuous occupation looks like from the inside.

Which brings us, logically, to the property developers.

When Television Centre came up for redevelopment, they understood the history wasn't an obstacle to work around. The listed circular structure, the famous façade, the fountain with the Helios statue, all featured prominently on their glossy brochures. The BBC's studios stayed as studios. The offices became The Helios and The Crescent. The whole compound became what developers now call a "mixed-use destination," which is the industry's slightly clinical way of saying: a place that already means something before you arrive.

Across the road, White City Living shows the scale of what has happened here. More than two thousand five hundred homes have risen beside the Central line, complete with a rooftop beach club that looks like it belongs on holiday brochures. It is one of the clearest signs that W12 has become a true residential district, not only a postcode people pass through for work.

Most projects have to manufacture this ‘soul’ from scratch – commission a mural here, name a courtyard after some vaguely relevant Victorian there – and hope the cumulative effect feels organic rather than like a branding exercise. In London, you don't really have to manufacture any history. The city has already done the work. All you have to do is not ruin it.

Television Centre is the perfect example. You can buy a flat here, have a Soho House-managed gym in your basement, a rooftop pool overhead, and actual live television is being made in the courtyard below. The TARDIS used to park roughly where the concierge desk is now. These things coexist without any apparent friction, because this is London, a city where the third century and the twenty-first sit next to each other on the same street and neither finds it worth remarking on.

And it keeps evolving. A significant expansion to Television Centre is on the way, adding new homes, new public spaces and another layer to the story of W12. When a place works, the city simply builds more of it.

That's the thing about W12. Here? Del Boy and Rodney once dressed as Batman and Robin and ran around this building for a Christmas Special. Over there? The Westfield car park. The history is on your doorstep. It just also happens to have a very good gym.

Live from London,
It's Saturday Night

Saturday Night Live has, for fifty years, been the soil where American comedy grows. Lorne Michaels has used an uncanny genius for finding comedic talent before anyone else knows it’s there and pointing a very bright light at it. Eddie Murphy. Tina Fey. Will Ferrell. Kristen Wiig. Amy Poehler. Adam Sandler. All of them started here.

Let us show you around W12

Property for sale Property to let Sign up on My Foxtons Pop by the local office

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