Alexandra Palace television station

London, 1936. This lattice mast on top of the south-east tower of Alexandra Palace is where regular television began: on 2 November 1936 the BBC opened what it called the world's first regular high-definition service from studios in the building below. At first the BBC alternated two rival systems week by week, Baird's 240-line system and Marconi-EMI's 405-line one, before settling on 405 lines. Compared with the concrete giants later in this gallery the mast is tiny, but every television tower that followed descends from it, and it still stands above the Victorian palace, as this 2025 photo shows.