Alexandra Palace is a venue that fits, but will darts outgrow it one day? | Jonathan Liew
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All 90,000 world championship tickets sold out in 15 minutes, so it seems a matter of time before money talks. They’re always finding stuff here. Every time the trustees of Alexandra Palace undertake some renovation work on the 151-year-old building, they discover artefacts from the venue’s past: a kind of people’s history in detritus. Usually it’s just rusty coins and ticket stubs. But then there was the time they found perfectly preserved vials of early prototype tetanus vaccine embedded in a wall, a relic from when the place was a first world war hospital. Or a bit of Victorian era graffiti from a disgruntled tradesman, reading: “The wages of sin is death, the wages of a carpenter is worse.”.
![[Jonathan Liew]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2019/11/25/Jonathan_Liew.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
What will they find of today, decades hence, in the palace’s dusty niches and beneath its rotting floorboards? What will the archivists of the future make of the crumpled nun’s wimple, the faded receipt for a halloumi pitta pocket (only £12.50 at 2024 prices), the multiple small plastic sachets containing traces of mysterious white powdery residue? What stories will they tell of us, here, now?.
![[Luke Humphries enjoys his first-round victory against France’s Thibault Tricole on the opening night]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1696bfa25ceb8b7cf3fd2c77049dfb9666365a85/0_133_3979_2387/master/3979.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Probably not – if we’re being totally honest – the story of how Thibault Tricole overcame Joe Comito in the opening game of the night before succumbing to the defending champion, Luke Humphries, in round two. Or Keane Barry upsetting Kim Huybrechts, or Jermaine Wattimena continuing his sparkling 2024 with a fine win over Stefan Bellmont.
Not that any of this was unimportant or trivial. Humphries looked fine, in case you’re wondering, at least when he wasn’t wandering into the single five. But in a curious inversion of the normal dynamics of big-time sport, there are times when what happens on the stage feels entirely transient. It is everything else – the palace, and its people – that will endure.
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