Wells Coates at the BBC: Making the Immaterial Material

A talk that explores Wells Coates’s designs for BBC Broadcasting House. In May 1932 the BBC’s new headquarters building, Broadcasting House, was completed. Its exterior, designed by in a severe modern classical style by Val Myer and F.J.Watson Hart, signalled the necessary gravitas of a modern corporation charged with broadcasting to nation and empire. Its interior, in contrast, housed 19 studios designed by the emerging leaders of Britain’s modernist movement, including Wells Coates. In this talk, Elizabeth Darling will take us on a tour of his studios, showing how, by using the most up-to-date materials, he created an ‘inventive modernism’ that expressed the modernity of the new technology of broadcasting. This architecture of the ether, described as ‘alive, brave and new’, was the first public commission for modernist architects in Britain. Elizabeth Darling is an architectural historian, lecturer, curator and writer. She is an expert in histories of modernist cultures in Britain, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, and on women and the built environment from the 1890s to the present day. She has published extensively, including her major revisionist study of British modernism Re-forming Britain, Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (Routledge, 2007), which includes a detailed study of the Lawn Road Flats, her 2012 monograph Wells Coates (Historic England/RIBA Publishing) and her new book Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC 1922-1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026).