After more than 60 years as the home of BBC Research and Innovation, Kingswood Warren is closing at the end of the month, writes David Fox.
The site has been sold for residential development and BBC R&D is moving to Centre House in West London, beside Television Centre.
Kingswood Warren, a large, neo-Gothic country house, has been in use since 1948 and many significant broadcast technologies have been worked on there, such as Teletext, Nicam Digital Stereo, DAB radio, HDTV, interactivity, digital terrestrial transmission (most recently the DVB-T2 technology) and 3D.
Many of the technologies developed at Kingswood Warren have been advanced in conjunction with other broadcasters, such as NHK (with which the BBC has recently been working on Super Hi-Vision and higher framerate recording). It has also worked on Production Magic technology, such as virtual graphics for election coverage or sports, including new production tools and methods being developed for the 2012 Olympics.
The new facility at Centre House is being fitted with completely new infrastructure, including a reference digital transmission suite. However, it will have about one third of the space of Kingswood Warren, although there will also be dedicated TV and audio studios (TC0 and TC12) at TV Centre.
