BBC Broadcasting House

Broadcasting House is the headquarters and registered office of the BBC, located 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 was built in the Art Deco style, and features a facing o of Portland stone over a steel frame. It is Grade 2* listed building and includes the BBC Radio Theatre, from where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience, and lobby which has been used as a location for filming of the 1998 BBC television series In the Red.

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, which were replaced by a new wing completed in 2005. The wing was named the “John Peel Wing” in 2012, after the disc jockey. BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 1 Xtra  and BBC London moved from other locations in London to the new wing.BBC Arabic Television and BBC Persian Television were established after the wing was built and broadcast from there.

The main building was refurbished, and a new extension built to the rear of it. The radio stations BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4,BBC Radio 4 Extra and the BBC world Service all transferred to newly refurbished studios within the building. The new extension links the old building with the John Peel Wing, and includes a new combined newsroom for BBC News, featuring studios for the BBC News Channel , BBC World News and other news programming. All news operations moved from BBC Television Centre in March 2013.

The official name of the building remains Broadcasting House but the BBC now also uses the term new Broadcasting House (with a small ‘n’) in its publicity which refers to the new extension rather than the whole building, with the old part of Broadcasting House known as old Broadcasting House.

National Gallery

The National Gallery is an art museum onTrafalgar Square in London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The Gallery is an exempt charity and a non-departmental public body of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection is free of charge. It is the fifth most visited art museum in the world, after the Musee du Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and Tate Modern.

Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalizing an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts, in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake and by private donations, which comprise two-thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting “from Giotto to Cezanne” are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case.