A National Institution

As it approached its second decade, the BBC's happy-go-lucky attitude was fading fast. And, as David Hendy reveals in the second instalment of our 13-part series tracing the corporation's cultural impact, the government was now taking a keen interest

- Por David Hendy. Photographs by BBC, Getty Images and Bridgman

0n Saturday 26 September 1931, less than a decade after its creation, the BBC began the eight-month-long task of packing its bags and moving from the cramped rabbit warren of Savoy Hill to a gleaming purpose-built headquarters building in Portland Place. When the first programmes were broadcast from this new home the following May, the occasion did not just mark a more comfortable working life for staff - it announced the BBC's arrival as a grand institution at the heart of the nation. The BBC had described Savoy Hill as the place where it had “spent its childhood and grew up to man's estate”. Now it had reached adulthood.

The building, north of Oxford Circus, was called Broadcasting House. Some 43,000 tonnes of London clay had been excavated to create three basement floors descending 12 metres below street level. Above ground were nine floors, 500 windows, balconies planted with bay trees, and a clock tower topped with a vast turtle-back roof. The edifice consisted of 2,630,000 blocks of shimmering white stone arranged in the gently curved shape of an ocean liner.

Inside, a state-of-the-art “sound factory had been created. Twenty-two studios, numerous cloakrooms, green rooms and a large concert hall, each decorated with art deco flourishes and equipped with the latest radio technology, were stacked in a central tower insulated from exterior noise by a 1.2metre-thick wall and hundreds of offices around the building's outer edges. The entrance hall, reached through an imposing set of bronze front doors, was clad in cool marble, creating an aura of sophisticated modernity. The BBC's new home, proclaimed the Daily Express, was nothing less than the “brain centre of modern civilisation”.