Decommissioning TVC: Technological archaeology

Last week, the last BBC links passing through Television Centre were taken out, marking an end to not only 18 months of migration of technology services away from the building, but also 54 years of TVC being at the heart of the BBC.

The last BBC productions in TVC were early in 2013, and since then, the job of untangling the BBC's technology from TVC has been carefully carried out. The original 1960 handbook for TVC said that a: "Central Apparatus Room on the third floor is the technical nerve-centre of the network, dealing with the origination, assembly and distribution of television programmes", and until this year, that was still very much the case.

The TVC Closure project, run by a joint BBC and Atos team, has moved or closed down about 7,500 circuit connections, over 20 satellite dishes, 300 IT servers and also the main third floor Central Apparatus Area control room operation, that has been there since TVC opened. All the work has had to be meticulously planned, as so much of what the BBC produces passes through the site, and it has been carefully carried out while keeping the BBC on air - with only a couple of exceptions, for example, there have been a couple of essential planned outages, including a few minutes when the main satellite uplink for the BBC's television service over satellite was moved.

We're confident that there are no links remaining now, but as decommissioning TVC is really technological archaeology, there's still a remote chance of something ancient and undiscovered lurking in the depths… TVC was designed to be the BBC's hub, and it is a testament to that design that it has served the BBC so well since 1960. Thank you TVC!

Lynden Potter is Head of delivery, Major projects infrastructure

• Read also TVC past, present and future
• And One last look around: Television Centre 18 months on