Starting Gate, Wood Green

Grade II listed:- Public House on a corner site. Built 1875 (the same year as the opening of Alexandra Palace) as the "Palace Cafe"; a public house by 1896; refitted internally 1899 by Richard Dickenson of-St John Street, Adelphi. Yellow stock brick with red brick dressings. Public House frontage with paired pink granite pilasters on a black granite plinth. 6 windows, 1 Window to chamfered angle and 2 windows to St Michael's Street. 3 storeys and cellars. Each street with a depressed arch entrance to recessed doorway with double-panelled and part-glazed doors flanked by panelled and engraved glass screens. Windows have round-arched glazing and top panels of geometric pattern. Fascia with cornice. Upper floors have rusticated brick strips at angles and bays. 1st floor 2-pane sashes brick architraved with keystones and timber open pediments. 2nd floor sashes with gauged brick heads and continuous brick dentil cornice sill band. similar cornice above to coped parapet. To left a lower 2-storey, 3-window extension with late C19 shopfront and central pedimented chimney breast rising through upper floors. Roundel on chimney breast dated 1875. Interior has cast iron columns with capitals and many original features including screens with engraved glass, part of a snob screen, chimney pieces and an overmantle, lincrusta decoration and a series of framed panels containing water-colour paintings, mostly pastoral views but one of Alexandra Palace. Originally known as the Alexandra Palace Hotel, it became the Alexandra Palace and Railway Hotel when the Great Eastern Railway station was opened in 1906 and in 1958, when a racecourse was opened at the bottom of the southern slopes, the Starting Gate.