The Starting Gate Public House

The Starting Gate Public House is located on a corner site on Station Road and was built in 1875, the same year Alexandra Palace opened. Initially named the "Palace Cafe," it became a public house by 1896 and was refitted internally in 1899 by Richard Dickenson of St John Street, Adelphi. The building features yellow stock brick with red brick dressings and has a public house frontage with paired pink granite pilasters on a black granite plinth.

It stands three storeys high with cellars and has six windows, including one at the chamfered angle and two facing St Michael's Street. Each street has a depressed arch entrance leading to a recessed doorway with double-panelled and part-glazed doors, flanked by panelled and engraved glass screens. The windows have round-arched glazing with top panels featuring geometric patterns. The fascia is adorned with a cornice, and the upper floors display rusticated brick strips at angles and bays.

On the first floor, there are 2-pane sash windows with brick architraves, keystones, and timber open pediments. The second floor features sashes with gauged brick heads and a continuous brick dentil cornice sill band, with a similar cornice above the coped parapet. To the left, there is a lower two-storey, three-window extension with a late 19th-century shopfront and a central pedimented chimney breast that rises through the upper floors, marked by a roundel dated 1875.

Inside, the pub retains many original features, including cast iron columns with capitals, screens with engraved glass, part of a snob screen, chimney pieces, an overmantle, lincrusta decoration, and a series of framed panels containing watercolour paintings, mostly depicting pastoral views, with one featuring Alexandra Palace. Originally known as the Alexandra Palace Hotel, it was renamed the Alexandra Palace and Railway Hotel when the Great Eastern Railway station opened in 1906, and in 1958, it became known as The Starting Gate following the opening of a racecourse nearby.