Royal Albert Hall

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Albert Hall seats 5,272 people on the northern edge of South Kensington, London, yet it was once designed to hold 8,000. It has, on occasion, crammed in as many as 12,000. What draws so many people to this elliptical brick building, again and again, across more than 150 years? The hall has been the site of suffragette meetings, Einstein's plea for refugee academics, Muhammad Ali's exhibition bouts, Pink Floyd shooting cannons from the stage, and Adele's DVD that sold more than three million copies worldwide. It hosts over 390 shows in its main auditorium every year and a further 1,000 events in the spaces beyond it. It is, as it has been affectionately titled, "The Nation's Village Hall." But behind that warm nickname lies a story of grief, imperial ambition, an echo that plagued the building for nearly a century, and a cast of performers and events that reads like a strange and glorious hallucination of British cultural life.

• 2. Prince Albert's Unrealised Dream

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  The Great Exhibition of 1851, organised by Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, was held in Hyde Park and was a considerable success. Albert used its momentum to propose a cluster of permanent public facilities in the area, a project that came to be known as Albertopolis. The Exhibition's Royal Commission bought Gore House for the purpose, but progress was slow. In 1861, before any of his grand plans had been realised, Albert died.

  A memorial was proposed for Hyde Park, with a Great Hall positioned opposite it. The Albert Memorial, visible directly to the north in Kensington Gardens, became the decorative half of this tribute; the hall itself would serve as the practical half. Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone on the 20th of May 1867, and at that moment she changed its name. It had been planned as the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences. She renamed it the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences, in memory of the husband who had died six years before.

  The hall was designed by Captain Francis Fowke and Major-General Henry Y. D. Scott of the Royal Engineers and built by Lucas Brothers. Their influences ranged widely: ancient amphitheatres, the ideas of architect Gottfried Semper encountered during his time at the South Kensington Museum, and the recently opened Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, which the contemporary press set up as the design to surpass. The structure rose primarily from Fareham Red brick, with terra cotta block decoration produced by Gibbs and Canning of Tamworth.

• 3. The Dome and the Echo

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  Rowland Mason Ordish designed the great dome of wrought iron and glazed glass that crowns the building and rises 135 feet. Before it was fixed to the hall, there was a trial assembly of the entire iron framework in Manchester. The sections were then dismantled, transported to London by horse and cart, and rebuilt on site. When the moment came to remove the temporary support structure, only volunteers remained on the ground, in case the dome fell. It did drop, but only by a small margin.

  The hall was scheduled to be completed by Christmas Day 1870. Queen Victoria visited a few weeks before that deadline to inspect progress. The official opening ceremony was held on the 29th of March 1871, brought forward from the 1st of May, which had been chosen as the twentieth anniversary of the Great Exhibition. Victoria was too overcome to speak at the ceremony; Edward, the Prince of Wales, delivered the welcoming speech in her place. Her only recorded remark about the hall was that it reminded her of the British constitution.

  The first concert made the acoustic problem impossible to ignore. A strong echo rolled around the dome and doubled every sound. Engineers suspended a canvas awning below the dome, which helped and also shielded concert-goers from sun coming through the glass, but the echo persisted for decades. The joke that circulated was that the hall was "the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice." The awning came down in 1949 and was replaced with fluted aluminium panels, but the acoustics were not properly addressed until 1969, when large fibreglass discs were installed beneath the ceiling. Concert-goers came to call them the "mushrooms" or "flying saucers."

• 4. A Stage for Everyone

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  In July 1871, just months after the opening, French organist Camille Saint-Saëns performed Charles Gounod's Church Scene from Faust at the hall. The Orchestra described his playing as "an exceptional and distinguished performer... the effect was most marvellous." That standard of ambition set an early template.

  In May 1877, Richard Wagner himself conducted the first half of each of eight concerts forming the Grand Wagner Festival. After finishing his portion with the baton, Wagner handed it to conductor Hans Richter and retired to a large armchair at the corner of the stage for the remainder of each concert. Among the audience was his wife Cosima, daughter of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

  In 1906, Elsie Fogerty founded the Central School of Speech and Drama at the hall, using the space then called the West Theatre, now known as the Elgar Room, as its theatre. Students who graduated from its classes while it was based at the hall included Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Harold Pinter, Laurence Olivier, and Peggy Ashcroft. The school moved to Swiss Cottage in north London in 1957.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff performed at the London Ballad Concert in 1911, playing his Prelude in C-sharp minor and Elegie in E-flat minor. In 1926, British media proprietor Lew Grade, then working as a dancer, won the Charleston Championship of the World at the hall, with Fred Astaire among the judges. In 1933, Albert Einstein led what became known as the Einstein Meeting at the hall, organised for the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, a British charity.

• 5. Concerts That Left a Mark

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  On the 26th of June 1969, Pink Floyd staged a concert at the hall that involved shooting cannons, building furniture on stage, and releasing a man in a gorilla suit into the audience. At one point, Rick Wright played the hall's pipe organ, performing "The End of the Beginning," the final section of "Saucerful of Secrets," joined by the brass of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the ladies of the Ealing Central Amateur Choir. A portion of that pipe organ recording appears on Pink Floyd's album The Endless River.

  In November 1969, Petula Clark performed a sold-out concert that was filmed as the first colour broadcast on BBC, screened at one minute past midnight on the 15th of November 1969. Clark had first appeared at the hall in 1943, and her 1983 concert marked the 40th anniversary of that debut.

  On the 22nd of September 2011, Adele performed a single night at the hall during her tour. The concert DVD debuted at number one in the United States with 96,000 copies sold in its first week, the highest one-week figure for a music DVD in four years. By the 28th of November 2012, it had passed one million copies sold in the United States and three million worldwide, making it the first music DVD to surpass one million US sales since the Eagles' Farewell 1 Tour Live from Melbourne in 2005. The live recording of "Set Fire to the Rain" taken from that night won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in 2013.

  Eric Clapton made his first appearance at the hall in December 1964 with the Yardbirds. The hall was also the venue for his band Cream's farewell concerts in 1968 and their reunion shows in 2005. Clapton passed 200 shows at the hall in 2015, and has described performing there as "playing in my front room."

• 6. The BBC Proms

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  The BBC Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts began in 1895 and came to the Royal Albert Hall in 1941 after the Queen's Hall was destroyed in an air raid. In 1944, with the danger to the hall itself increasing, part of the Proms season was moved to the Bedford Corn Exchange. After the war ended, the concerts returned and have been held at the hall every summer since.

  The term "proms" derives from the original practice of audience members promenading through certain areas during performances. Those who attend, particularly those who stand rather than sit, are called "Prommers." Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek described the Proms as "the world's largest and most democratic musical festival" among classical music festivals. Each season now runs to more than 70 concerts, with additional events at other venues across the United Kingdom. In 2009, the season reached 100 concerts for the first time.

• 7. Building, Rebuilding, Remembering

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  From 1996 to 2004, the hall underwent a major programme of renovation and development supported by a 20 million pound grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a further 20 million pounds from Arts Council England. The architecture and engineering firm BDP designed and supervised thirty separate projects without halting the hall's schedule of events.

  Among the most significant was a new south porch, named the Meitar Foyer following a substantial donation from Mr and Mrs Meitar. Underground vehicle access was built beneath the south steps, with a loading bay capable of accommodating three large goods vehicles. The south steps were then reconstructed around the new porch in a style matching the three existing porches. The Stalls were rebuilt in a four-week window in 2000, using steel supports to free space below for two new bars, and 1,534 unique pivoting seats were laid, along with 180 additional prime seats.

  Between 2002 and 2004, Mander Organs undertook a major rebuilding of the great organ, known as the Voice of Jupiter. Built by "Father" Henry Willis in 1871 and previously rebuilt by Harrison and Harrison in 1924 and 1933, it now stands as the second-largest pipe organ in the British Isles, with 9,997 pipes across 147 stops. Only the Grand Organ in Liverpool Cathedral, with 10,268 pipes, is larger.

  In 2018, a Walk of Fame was unveiled at the hall. The first eleven recipients of a star included the Suffragettes, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali, and Eric Clapton, all described as "key players" in the building's history. Ali had called the venue a "helluva hall." On the 11th of November 2023, King Charles III and Queen Camilla unveiled two bronze statues of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, before the Festival of Remembrance, marking the hall's 150th anniversary.