Alexandra Palace Darts: The Venue, Seating and Travel

The W3 bus leaves the traffic of Wood Green High Road, crosses the railway and starts to climb. Halfway up, the trees fall away and the whole of London is laid out below, from the towers of the City to the lights at Canary Wharf. On a December evening a good share of the passengers are dressed as traffic cones or nuns. They get off at the top, outside a long yellow-brick Victorian hall with a glass roof at one end and a television mast at the other.

That building is Alexandra Palace, in Alexandra Park in the London Borough of Haringey, between Wood Green and Muswell Hill. It has staged the PDC World Championship every winter since the 2008 event, which opened in December 2007. For nineteen championships the darts was played in the West Hall, in front of a little over 3,000 people a session. The PDC has since announced a move down the corridor to the much larger Great Hall, with around 5,000 seats, beginning with the championship that opens in December 2026.

Where Alexandra Palace is, and what kind of place it is

North London has plenty of high ground, and the Palace has one of the best pieces of it: a ridge more than 300 feet high, with parkland dropping away on every side. The building runs along the crest. Its south front faces the city across a broad terrace; its north side is the working side, turned towards the streets behind the ridge.

It is not an arena. That is the first thing a visitor who knows the darts from television gets wrong. An arena is a bowl built around a floor. Alexandra Palace is an exhibition building, a row of very large rooms under iron and glass, put up for flower shows, concerts and the general improvement of Victorian Londoners. The darts takes over some of those rooms for three weeks and builds a temporary auditorium inside them.

Fact	Detail
Address	Alexandra Palace Way, London N22 7AY
Borough	Haringey
Setting	Alexandra Park, between Wood Green and Muswell Hill
Nearest railway station	Alexandra Palace, on the Great Northern route from Moorgate
Nearest Underground station	Wood Green, Piccadilly line
Bus to the door	W3
Owner	Alexandra Park and Palace Charitable Trust, with Haringey Council as trustee
First darts championship	The 2008 PDC World Championship, begun in December 2007

The layout matters for finding the way in. Walking along the building from west to east, a visitor passes the Palm Court, which is the glass-roofed entrance hall; then the West Hall; then the Great Hall at the centre, behind the big rose window; then the East Court, the ice rink and the restored Victorian theatre. The old BBC studios and the mast stand at the south-east corner.

The Palace is held by a charitable trust for public use, an arrangement that goes back to an Act of Parliament of 1900, and the money it earns from hiring out its halls goes towards keeping a very large and very old building standing. The darts is one of its biggest regular hirings.

Which hall the Alexandra Palace darts is played in

The West Hall was the home of the championship from the first night in December 2007 to the final in January 2026. It is the smaller of the two main halls, a long rectangle beside the Palm Court, and the PDC's set filled it from wall to wall: a stage across one end, rows of long tables running away from it down the length of the floor, and banks of temporary tiered seating at the back and along the sides.

Capacity crept up over the years as the layout was reworked. The room held about 2,500 for darts at first and was listed at 3,200 by the end. That is small for an event of this profile. A Premier League night in a city arena plays to three or four times as many.

West Hall3200seats

Great Hall as announced5000seats

The West Hall figure is the capacity listed for the championship in its final years there. The Great Hall figure is the capacity announced by the PDC for the move, before the hall had been used for the event.

Show the numbers

Spectators per session in the two halls

Item	Value
West Hall	3200seats
Great Hall as announced	5000seats

The move to the Great Hall

Demand outgrew the room long before the PDC acted on it. Tickets for the West Hall sold out almost as soon as they were released in the championship's later years there, and the number of people who wanted to go and could not was many times the number who got in.

The answer was already under the same roof. The Great Hall is the centrepiece of the building, the room with the Willis organ at one end and the rose window at the other, and it holds more than ten thousand standing for a concert. Seated for darts, with a stage, tables and tiers, the PDC put its capacity at around 5,000. The 2026 championship was the last in the West Hall. The agreement announced for the Great Hall runs until at least 2031, and the PDC said the larger room would put roughly 180,000 tickets on sale across the event, to be allocated by ballot.

One caution. At the time this page was written the Great Hall layout had been announced in outline and not yet seen in use, so the description of it here is the plan, not a report. The principles do not change with the room: stage at one end, tables on the floor, tiers behind and beside them. The distances do.

Feature	West Hall	Great Hall
Used for the championship	2008 to 2026 events	From the event opening in December 2026
Capacity for darts	About 3,200 at the end	About 5,000 as announced
Position in the building	West end, beside the Palm Court	Centre, behind the rose window
Other regular uses	Exhibitions and smaller concerts	The largest concerts and exhibitions
Character	Low, long and loud	Higher roof, far more floor

The snooker comparison is a useful one for a British sports reader. The Palace has also housed the Masters in nearly every January since 2012, as our guide to the Masters and how its field is chosen describes, and the gap between the last dart of the championship and the first frame of the snooker is a matter of days.

Table seats and tiered seats: what each ticket gives

There are two kinds of seat at the darts, and they offer different evenings.

A table seat is a chair at one of the long tables on the floor, sold individually or in blocks. It puts a spectator in the middle of the room, close to the walkway the players use, with somewhere to put a drink. Tables nearer the stage are the most sought after and are sold in a higher band. The view of the board from a table is level and often partly blocked by the people in front, particularly once they are standing, which is most of the time a leg is being finished.

A tiered seat is a place on the raked temporary stands behind and beside the tables. There is no table. The view is over the heads of the floor crowd and takes in the whole room, which many regulars prefer, and the tiers are generally the cheaper band.

How far away the stage is

Neither kind of seat lets anybody watch the darts land. A dartboard is a little under eighteen inches across, the treble twenty is a strip about the size of a stick of chewing gum, and the oche stands just over seven feet nine inches from the board. Those measurements, set out in our page on the official board height and throwing distance, were designed for a pub wall. From the front tables a spectator can see a dart hit the upper half of the board. From the back of the hall the board is a pale dot under the lights.

So the crowd watches the screens. Large screens hang either side of the stage and further down the room, carrying the same close-up of the board that the television audience sees, with the score beside it. The live part of the experience is the players' rhythm, the noise, and the half-second in which three thousand people react to a dart before the caller has opened his mouth. The darts themselves are watched on television, in the room, by people who could have stayed at home.

That is not a complaint. It is what the event is, and it explains why seat choice matters less than first-timers think. A place with a clear line to a screen and a short route to the bar and the toilets is a good seat. A place near the front with a pillar of standing bodies between it and the screen is not.

Getting to Alexandra Palace by train and Tube

Public transport is the sensible way up, and there are two rail routes that end in the same bus.

By train. Alexandra Palace station is at the bottom of the hill on the eastern side. It is on the Great Northern route out of Moorgate, the third stop after Finsbury Park on stopping services, and trains continue north towards Hertfordshire. Finsbury Park is the interchange that matters for most people, because the Victoria and Piccadilly lines both stop there and it is two stops from King's Cross on the Victoria line.

By Tube. Wood Green, on the Piccadilly line, is the nearest Underground station. It is further from the Palace than the railway station is, and the walk from it is long and uphill, so most people coming by Tube take the bus from outside.

By bus. The W3 is the route that goes to the door. It runs between Finsbury Park and Northumberland Park, passing Alexandra Palace station and Wood Green station on the way, and it climbs Alexandra Palace Way and stops outside the building. On darts days it fills up early in both directions.

1. 1Reach Finsbury ParkTake the Victoria or Piccadilly line to Finsbury Park, where the Underground meets the Great Northern platforms.
2. 2Great Northern trainBoard a stopping service towards Hertfordshire and leave at Alexandra Palace, the third stop.
3. 3Leave the stationFollow the signs for the Palace. The bus stop and the park entrance are both a short walk from the exit.
4. 4Bus or footpathTake the W3 up Alexandra Palace Way, or walk up through the park, which is steep and unlit in places.
5. 5EntranceThe Palm Court at the western end is the building's main public entrance. Follow the event signs on the day, and expect tickets and bags to be checked before going in.

A description of the route, not a timetable. Service patterns and any event-day shuttle are set by the operators and the venue each year.

The walk through the park

From Alexandra Palace station the footpath climbs through the park to the terrace in a quarter of an hour or so, depending on fitness and footwear. It is a pleasant walk in daylight before an afternoon session. In the dark, in December, in a costume that restricts the knees, it is less so, and the paths can be muddy.

From Wood Green the walk is longer, along Station Road and then up the hill, and takes most people twenty minutes or more. It is the route to choose only if the buses are hopeless.

Starting point	Route	Final stage
Moorgate or Old Street	Great Northern train	Bus or walk from Alexandra Palace station
King's Cross	Victoria line to Finsbury Park, then train	Bus or walk from Alexandra Palace station
West End	Piccadilly line to Wood Green	W3 bus up the hill
Finsbury Park	W3 bus throughout, or train	Bus stops outside the Palace
Muswell Hill	On foot or by local bus	Walk in from the western end of the park

The Palace has in some years run a shuttle bus on event days between the stations and the building. Whether it runs, and from where, is a question for the venue's own travel page in the week of the visit.

Driving, parking and getting home after the evening session

Driving is possible and rarely a good idea.

Alexandra Palace Way crosses the hill from Muswell Hill to Wood Green, and the Palace's car parks are strung along it. They are finite, they are shared with everything else going on in the park, and they are charged for. On a sold-out evening they fill. The surrounding streets on both sides of the park are residential, and many are covered by parking controls, with the hours displayed on the signs. Anyone parking in them should read every sign on the street, including the ones further along.

The more basic objection is the obvious one. The darts is an event at which most of the audience drinks, and a car is a liability at the end of it.

The late finish

An evening session of darts has no fixed finishing time. The number of matches is known in advance; their length is not. A session in which every match goes to a deciding set ends a good deal later than one made up of whitewashes, and the later rounds, with longer matches, are the hardest to predict.

That matters on a hill in the suburbs. The routes home are the same as the routes out: the W3 down to Wood Green or Alexandra Palace station, then the Piccadilly line or the Great Northern train. After a long session several thousand people want the same bus at the same moment, and the queue at the stop outside the Palm Court can be slow. Many people walk down through the park to the railway station or along the road to Wood Green and are on a platform before the third bus has loaded.

Three practical points follow. Know the time of the last train from Alexandra Palace station before going in, since it is a National Rail service and does not run through the night. Know that the Piccadilly line from Wood Green is the fallback, and check its last train too. And if the match on stage is the last of the session and the journey home is tight, accept that leaving during the final set is a choice plenty of people make.

Taxis and private hire cars do come up the hill, but the single road across it is slow when the session empties, and a booked car can take longer to arrive than the walk to the station would have taken.

A session from doors to the last dart

The championship is sold by the session. Most days have two, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, and each has its own ticket and its own crowd. The hall is cleared between them.

1. 1DoorsThe entrance opens well before the first match. Tickets are scanned and bags searched on the way in.
2. 2Fan areaSpectators gather around the food stalls, bars and merchandise stands before going through to the hall.
3. 3Into the hallSeats are found, the tables fill, and the master of ceremonies warms up the room.
4. 4The matchesEach match begins with the two walk-ons. Short breaks are taken between sets and between matches.
5. 5Last dartThe winning double of the final match ends the session, and the room is emptied for cleaning or the night.

The order of events at a typical session. Start times and the number of matches vary by round and are printed on the ticket and in the PDC's schedule of play.

Before the first match

Doors open comfortably before play, and the time between is spent in the fan area. For the West Hall years this was centred on the Palm Court and the spaces around it: food stalls, long bars, merchandise, places to be photographed with a cardboard trophy. It is where groups meet, where costumes are adjusted, and where most of the session's eating is done, since nobody wants to queue for chips during a deciding set.

Drinks at the tables are bought by the pitcher, which is as much a part of the look of the event as the fancy dress. Food and drink bought on site can be taken into the hall. Food and drink bought elsewhere cannot.

How many matches, and how long

In the first rounds a session carries three or four matches over the shortest distance, the best of five sets. As the tournament goes on the matches lengthen and the number per session falls, until a session of the late rounds holds two. The length of each round, and the reason the schedule thins out, is covered in our guide to the sets, rounds and tie-breaks of the World Championship format.

A session lasts somewhere between three and four hours in the hall, more if the matches are close. Afternoon sessions are the quieter of the two, a relative term, and are the better choice for anyone who wants to follow the darts closely. Evening sessions are louder and looser. The crowd for the final is the exception to most of this: a larger share of it has come to watch.

What the Ally Pally crowd is like, and what it may not bring

The darts crowd is the event's signature, and it did not arrive by accident. The PDC and its broadcaster spent the 1990s and 2000s turning a pub game played in silence and cigarette smoke into a night out, and Alexandra Palace is where that project is most fully realised.

Fancy dress is the first thing anyone notices. Whole tables come as the same thing, and the costumes run from the obvious to the elaborate, with a strong showing each year for whatever was in the news. Nobody is obliged, and a fair part of any session turns up in ordinary clothes.

Then the cards. The "180" cards are handed out or left on the tables, printed on one side for holding up when a player hits a maximum and blank on the other. The blank side is the important one: people write messages on it for the cameras, greetings to family, jokes at the expense of friends who could not get a ticket.

And the singing. It happens between legs and between sets, when the music is played, and it stops, more or less, when a player is on the oche. The dance track "Chase the Sun" has been the unofficial anthem of the PDC for years, and the wordless chant the crowd puts to it is the sound of the tournament. Each player's entrance has its own tune, a subject with its own page here on walk-on songs and nicknames.

The house rules

The freedom has limits, and the PDC and the Palace enforce them.

• Costumes. Fancy dress is welcome, but anything offensive or political can be refused at the door, and football shirts and club colours have long been barred from PDC events.
• Bags. Bags are searched and large ones may not be admitted. The size limit is in the ticket terms.
• Food and drink. Nothing bought outside may be brought in.
• Age. The ticket terms set the rules on under-18s, who must be accompanied where they are admitted at all.
• Signs. Messages on cards are fine. Abuse, advertising and anything aimed at a player's private life are not, and stewards will remove them.
• Behaviour. Whistling and shouting as a player throws is the one thing the crowd is repeatedly asked not to do. Persistent offenders are removed.

That last rule has become a real tension. The players are throwing at a target the size of a postage stamp, and a whistle timed to the release of a dart at a double is a form of interference. Referees do stop play to ask for quiet, and the larger the room, the harder the problem is to police.

How the hall looks different on television

Television flatters the room. On screen the hall appears vast, a dark sea of tables stretching back from a blazing stage. In person the West Hall was a long, fairly low room in which the back row could see the front.

The effect comes from how the pictures are made. The wide shots are taken from a camera on a crane arm that swings over the tables, low and close to the crowd, with a wide lens that stretches the distance to the stage. The roof is kept dark and the lighting is aimed at the stage and the front tables, so the edges of the room vanish and the hall seems to have no walls. The cutaways to the crowd are chosen for density and costume. A viewer never sees an empty seat because the director never points a camera at one.

The darts itself is covered by a small set of fixed cameras trained on the board, so tight that the treble twenty fills a good part of the frame, and by cameras on each player's face and throwing arm. The split screen, with the thrower on one side and the board on the other, is the picture that made darts work on television at all, because it shows cause and effect at once. A spectator in the room gets neither half as clearly, which is why the big screens in the hall carry the broadcast picture.

The walk-on

The walk-on is the one piece of the show designed for the room first and television second. Players enter from the side or back of the hall and make their way to the stage along a barriered walkway between the tables, to their own music, with security alongside and hands reaching over the rail. It takes a minute or so. On television it is a tracking shot. At a table beside the walkway it is the moment the ticket was bought for.

What television cannot convey is the temperature. Several thousand people, stage lighting and a Victorian building make for a warm room by the end of a session, whatever the weather on the terrace outside. Darts slip in a sweating hand.

Why the PDC left the Circus Tavern for Alexandra Palace

For fourteen championships the PDC's world title was decided in a cabaret club in Essex. The Circus Tavern in Purfleet, beside the A13, was a low room built for an audience of around a thousand at most, with the smoke and the closeness of the places darts had come from. It gave the event an atmosphere that players of that generation still talk about with affection. It could not give it room.

By the middle of the 2000s the championship had outgrown the building in every measurable way. The field had risen from 24 players to 64. Raymond van Barneveld's switch from the rival British Darts Organisation in 2006 had brought the sport's two biggest names into the same tournament, and the 2007 final between him and Phil Taylor, settled in a sudden-death leg, drew attention the PDC had never had before. There were far more people wanting tickets than a cabaret club could seat. The background to the two rival championships is in our account of how darts divided in 1993, and the BDO's own home is described in our guide to the Lakeside Country Club at Frimley Green.

The PDC announced the move during 2007. The 2008 championship opened at Alexandra Palace that December, and John Part won it.

What the move did

The plain effect was arithmetic: the West Hall held several times what Purfleet could, in a building with the public spaces to feed, water and entertain them. The less plain effect was on the event's standing. A world championship in a Grade II listed palace overlooking London, a short train ride from the centre, is a different proposition for sponsors, for broadcasters and for people who had never thought of going to the darts. The fancy dress, the day-out culture and the Christmas-week audience all grew up at Alexandra Palace. It is doubtful they would have grown up in Purfleet.

Something was lost. The Circus Tavern was a darts room, and the crowd there was close enough to the stage to see the flights. Alexandra Palace is a show. Only two players won the title in both rooms: Phil Taylor, many times over, and John Part, champion at Purfleet in 2003 and at the Palace in 2008. Prize money tells the rest of the story, and there is no serious argument that the game would be where it is had the championship stayed put.

The building: the People's Palace, two fires and the BBC

Alexandra Palace opened on 24 May 1873, promoted as the People's Palace and intended as north London's answer to the Crystal Palace on the other side of the river. It was named after Alexandra of Denmark, who had married the Prince of Wales ten years earlier, the year the park itself opened. Sixteen days after the opening it burned down.

The rebuilding was fast. A new palace on the same site opened on 1 May 1875, and it is substantially that building, the work of the architect John Johnson, that stands today. It had a concert hall with a great organ built by Henry Willis, a theatre, a museum, lecture rooms and, in the grounds, a racecourse. It also struggled for money almost from the start, changed hands repeatedly, and was secured for the public by the Act of 1900 that created the trust.

• 1873First opened
• 16Days before the first fire
• 1875Reopened after rebuilding
• 1980Second great fire

Years taken from the Palace's own history and its listing. The sixteen days is the gap between the first opening and the first fire in 1873.

Television and the second fire

In 1935 the BBC leased the eastern end of the building, and in November 1936 it began the world's first regular public high-definition television service from studios there. The lattice mast at the south-east corner dates from that work and still transmits. The BBC went on using the Palace for news and later for Open University programmes for decades afterwards. For a venue now known to millions through a televised sport, it is a neat inheritance.

The second fire came on 10 July 1980. It destroyed the Great Hall, the Banqueting Suite and the rooms around them, about half the building. The outer walls stood, and the eastern end, with the theatre and the BBC studios, was saved. The restored Palace reopened in 1988, with the rebuilt Great Hall and West Hall as modern event spaces inside the Victorian shell. Those are the rooms the darts uses. The spectator sitting under the Great Hall roof is in a 1980s reconstruction of an 1870s replacement for a hall that lasted a fortnight.

Year	Event
1873	Opens on 24 May; destroyed by fire sixteen days later
1875	Rebuilt palace opens on 1 May
1900	Act of Parliament places park and palace in trust for public use
1936	BBC begins its regular television service from the east wing
1980	Fire on 10 July destroys the Great Hall, the Banqueting Suite and about half the building
1988	Restored building reopens
1996	Listed at Grade II
2018	Victorian theatre and East Court reopen after restoration

The work is not finished and may never be. Parts of the building remain derelict behind the public rooms, and the trust's restoration of the theatre and the east end, completed in 2018, was the largest project there since the 1980s. Hall hire pays for a share of that. Every table sold for the darts is, in a small way, a contribution to the roof.

Getting a ticket, and when to go

Tickets are sold by the PDC, session by session, with table and tiered seats in separate bands. For years they went on general sale in the summer or autumn after a priority period, and the popular sessions were gone almost at once. With the move to the Great Hall the PDC said the larger allocation would be distributed by ballot, an acknowledgement that a first-come sale had stopped being a fair way to ration them.

Prices are not given here, because they change each year and differ by session and by seat. The pattern is steadier than the numbers. Afternoon sessions in the first week are the easiest to get and the cheapest. Evenings cost more than afternoons. The sessions between Christmas and New Year, and the semi-finals and final, are the hardest of all.

A first visit is best made to an early-round afternoon. The crowd is in good humour, the matches are short enough that one dull contest does not sink the session, and the journey home is made in the early evening with the trains running normally. Anyone who wants the full noise should choose an evening in the week before Christmas.

Dress for two climates. The queue to get in forms outdoors on top of a hill in midwinter, and the terrace catches every wind that crosses north London. Inside, under the lights, the hall is hot within an hour. A coat that folds under a chair is worth more than one that needs looking after, and whatever is carried has to pass the bag check.

Spectators who need step-free access or a wheelchair space should arrange it when booking and not on the day. The public halls are on one level, but the accessible positions in a temporary seating layout are limited in number and are allocated through the PDC's ticketing in advance.

Buy only from the PDC's official outlets or its authorised resale. The ticket terms restrict resale, and one bought from a stranger outside the station is a good way to see the Palm Court and nothing else. For more on the sport's formats before a visit, our guides to darts and to other British venues are gathered on the England hub, and longer features sit on the blog.