Royal College of Music: Where Holst Met Vaughan Williams
Why is it significant?
Stand at the bottom of the steps behind the Albert Hall and face the building across the road, with its turrets, steep slate roofs and tall windows. With a little imagination it could be a château on the Loire.
Key Facts
| Place | Royal College of Music: Where Holst Met Vaughan Williams |
|---|---|
| Address | Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BS, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.49950, -0.17710 |
| Part of Walk | Albertopolis: Prince Albert's London of Museums, Music and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the bottom of the steps behind the Albert Hall and face the building across the road, with its turrets, steep slate roofs and tall windows. With a little imagination it could be a château on the Loire. Now listen: on most days, scales, arpeggios and stray bars of concertos drift out of the practice rooms.
This is the Royal College of Music, founded in 1882 under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, Albert's eldest son, who argued that Britain needed a national conservatoire to rival those of Paris, Leipzig and Vienna. It opened in 1883 in a smaller building just west of the Albert Hall, and moved into this palace by Arthur Blomfield in 1894. Its first director was George Grove, a civil engineer who had built iron lighthouses in the Caribbean before compiling the great dictionary of music that still carries his name.
The list of students reads like a history of British music. Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams met here in the 1890s and became lifelong friends, spending what they called field days playing their new sketches to each other and tearing them apart. Benjamin Britten studied here in the early 1930s. Even the museum has a celebrity: a clavicytherium, an upright keyboard instrument made around 1480, thought to be the oldest surviving stringed keyboard instrument in the world.
Why plant a music school among museums of science? Because for Albert and his circle there was no wall between the two. Music meant acoustics, mathematics and craftsmanship; science meant curiosity and beauty. The South Kensington estate was planned so that students of painting, music, engineering and natural history would share the same streets and lecture halls, and the prince himself was a capable musician who composed songs and played the organ.
Look along the road to your left, towards the campus of Imperial College. Above the modern blocks, a pale tower with a green copper dome still pokes into the sky on its own, like a lighthouse that has lost its sea. Walk towards it, into the college, and find the lawn at its foot.