The Palace hosted the inaugural Earthshot Prize, designed to incentivise the change needed to help repair the planet. You can watch the event on BBC1 (and in a nice link to our history, the initiative features Sir David Attenborough, who started his career in television here when the BBC’s studios were housed at the Palace).
Responding to the climate crisis will take a global effort, and at Ally Pally we are determined to play our part.
We’ve already made some important steps forward to reduce our environmental impact. This includes repairing and restoring large parts of the historic Palace in ways that will improve our energy efficiency and sustainability. Continuing to care for our award-winning Park, and the hundreds of species that make their homes here, remains a fundamental part of our charitable work. Meanwhile, our Creative Learning programme is helping thousands of young people from our community to develop their climate literacy and awareness of the opportunities we all have to make a difference.
But we are only just at the beginning and are taking a longer-term approach to understand how we can make this grand old Victorian building fit for the biggest challenge of the 21st century.
From energy consumption and plastic waste to sustainable transport, we are determined to do everything we can to make this venue greener and more sustainable in every activity we undertake.
How far could this go? Well, firstly we need to go further to make our operation as efficient as possible, minimising energy consumption and waste. We need to adapt the park to make it more resilient to a changing climate and an even better green oasis for the millions of visitors who come here every year. We need to work with the events industry to make every aspect of our operations more sustainable.
We want to help support the UK’s effort to get to net zero, and as quickly as possible. After that? Could the venue become carbon positive?
The challenges are big. The opportunities are big too. Our community, visitors and partners care about the future of our planet, and we want them to enjoy visiting a place that creates all the positive memories we are known for, with significantly less impact on the environment.
Doing this requires commitment … and, yes, investment, too. If you’d like to help us, please support us so that we can work together to ensure Alexandra Park & Palace is here, for you, forever.
We’ve already shown how a Victorian pleasure palace can remain relevant nearly 150 years after it was built. But a truly sustainable, green Ally Pally? That would be a prize really worth going for.
