place

Langham Place, London

Streets in the City of WestminsterUse British English from June 2015
"The BBC Church", Langham Place geograph.org.uk 254494

Langham Place is a short street in Westminster, central London, England. Just north of Oxford Circus, it connects Portland Place to the north with Regent Street to the south in London's West End. It is, or was, the location of many significant public buildings, and gives its name to the Langham Place group, a circle of early women's rights activists.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Langham Place, London (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Langham Place, London
Langham Place, City of Westminster Fitzrovia

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: Langham Place, LondonContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.5179 ° E -0.1434 °
placeShow on map

Address

Langham Place

Langham Place
W1B 2QS City of Westminster, Fitzrovia
England, United Kingdom
mapOpen on Google Maps

"The BBC Church", Langham Place geograph.org.uk 254494
Share experience

Nearby Places

Breathing (memorial sculpture)
Breathing (memorial sculpture)

Breathing is a memorial sculpture situated on the roof of the Peel Wing of BBC Broadcasting House, in London. The sculpture commemorates journalists and associated staff who have been killed whilst carrying out their work. It consists of a 10-metre (32 ft) high glass and steel column, with a torch-like, inverted spire shape, decorated with words. It also features a poem by James Fenton. At night the sculpture gently glows, then at 10 pm every evening (coinciding with the broadcast of the BBC Ten O'Clock News) the memorial shines a beam of light into the sky for 30 minutes, which reaches up to 900 meters (3,000 feet). It was reported in 2012 that the BBC was not turning the sculpture's lights on as often as it should be.The memorial was officially unveiled on 16 June 2008 by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The sculpture is by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, working in collaboration with the Broadcasting House architect Sir Richard MacCormac and his team at MJP Architects, Modus Operandi public art consultants and the engineers Whitby Bird & Partners. It was commissioned and selected as a result of an international competition for the BBC's public art scheme. The shape of the sculpture is inspired by the spire of the adjoining All Souls Church, and the radio mast on the roof of Broadcasting House. The architecture critic Ellis Woodman, of Building Design magazine, called Breathing the "most misconceived public artwork in London since the Queen Mother's gates".

Broadcasting House
Broadcasting House

Broadcasting House is the headquarters of the BBC, in Portland Place and Langham Place, London. The first radio broadcast from the building was made on 15 March 1932, and the building was officially opened two months later, on 15 May. The main building is in Art Deco style, with a facing of Portland stone over a steel frame. It is a Grade II* listed building and includes the BBC Radio Theatre, where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience. As part of a major consolidation of the BBC's property portfolio in London, Broadcasting House has been extensively renovated and extended. This involved the demolition of post-war extensions on the eastern side of the building, replaced by a new wing completed in 2005. The wing was named the "John Peel Wing" in 2012, after the disc jockey. BBC London, BBC Arabic Television and BBC Persian Television are housed in the new wing, which also contains the reception area for BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 1Xtra (the studios themselves are in the new extension to the main building). The main building was refurbished, and an extension built to the rear. The radio stations BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 4 Extra and the BBC World Service transferred to refurbished studios within the building. The extension links the old building with the John Peel Wing, and includes a new combined newsroom for BBC News, with studios for the BBC News channel, BBC World News and other news programming. The move of news operations from BBC Television Centre was completed in March 2013.The official name of the building is Broadcasting House but the BBC now also uses the term new Broadcasting House (with a small 'n') in its publicity referring to the new extension rather than the whole building, with the original building known as old Broadcasting House.

Queen's Hall
Queen's Hall

The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect Thomas Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. From 1895 until 1941, it was the home of the promenade concerts ("The Proms") founded by Robert Newman together with Henry Wood. The hall had drab decor and cramped seating but superb acoustics. It became known as the "musical centre of the [British] Empire", and several of the leading musicians and composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries performed there, including Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss. In the 1930s, the hall became the main London base of two new orchestras, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. These two ensembles raised the standards of orchestral playing in London to new heights, and the hall's resident orchestra, founded in 1893, was eclipsed and it disbanded in 1930. The new orchestras attracted another generation of musicians from Europe and the United States, including Serge Koussevitzky, Willem Mengelberg, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner. In 1941, during the Second World War, the building was destroyed by incendiary bombs in the London Blitz. Despite much lobbying for the hall to be rebuilt, the government decided against doing so. The main musical functions of the Queen's Hall were taken over by the Royal Albert Hall for the Proms, and the new Royal Festival Hall for the general concert season.