They’re always finding stuff here. Every time the trustees of Alexandra Palace undertake some renovation work on the 151-year-old building, they discover artefacts from the venue’s past: a kind of people’s history in detritus. Usually it’s just rusty coins and ticket stubs. But then there was the time they found perfectly preserved vials of early prototype tetanus vaccine embedded in a wall, a relic from when the place was a first world war hospital. Or a bit of Victorian era graffiti from a disgruntled tradesman, reading: “The wages of sin is death, the wages of a carpenter is worse.”
What will they find of today, decades hence, in the palace’s dusty niches and beneath its rotting floorboards? What will the archivists of the future make of the crumpled nun’s wimple, the faded receipt for a halloumi pitta pocket (only £12.50 at 2024 prices), the multiple small plastic sachets containing traces of mysterious white powdery residue? What stories will they tell of us, here, now?
