Royal Albert Hall: The Echo That Took a Century to Tame
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head back and follow the long band of pictures that wraps all the way around the top of the building, like a ribbon around a giant cake tin.
Key Facts
| Place | Royal Albert Hall: The Echo That Took a Century to Tame |
|---|---|
| Address | Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AP, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50100, -0.17740 |
| Part of Walk | Albertopolis: Prince Albert's London of Museums, Music and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head back and follow the long band of pictures that wraps all the way around the top of the building, like a ribbon around a giant cake tin. That mosaic frieze runs for some two hundred and forty metres, and its subject is the Triumph of Arts and Sciences... Albert's entire programme, spelled out in tiles around his hall.
Albert never saw any of it. The building was meant to be called the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but when Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1867 she announced, to general surprise, that it would be the Royal Albert Hall. It was designed by two military engineers, Captain Francis Fowke and Henry Young Darracott Scott, who took their inspiration from the amphitheatres of ancient Rome, and its iron and glass dome was a daring piece of engineering for the time.
At the opening on 29 March 1871 the Queen was too overcome to speak, so the Prince of Wales declared the hall open on her behalf. Then the trouble started: the vast dome produced a ferocious echo. It was joked that this was the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice. The cure took almost a century. In 1969 the huge fibreglass discs you can see hanging under the dome, nicknamed the mushrooms, were installed, and the sound was finally tamed.
The hall's most famous summer residents arrived by catastrophe. The Proms, the promenade concerts founded in 1895, used to live at the Queen's Hall near Oxford Circus. On the night of 10 May 1941 a German air raid destroyed it, and that summer the Proms moved here, where they have stayed ever since. Every season people still queue on the day for standing places in the arena, and the Last Night ends in a sea of flags and singing.
Behind the hall, at the top of a broad flight of steps, Albert appears yet again, this time standing in bronze on the memorial to the Great Exhibition. Beyond him rises a red-brick building with turrets that looks like a French château. Walk round the side of the hall and down the steps to Prince Consort Road.