In the round

This week, the Royal Albert Hall celebrates its 150th anniversary. With photographs taken during the unnatural quiet of lockdown, John Goodall looks at the remarkable story behind the creation of this world-famous venue

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AT noon on Wednesday, March 29, 1871, Queen Victoria set off in a royal cavalcade of nine closed carriages from Buckingham Palace for the official opening of the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences in South Kensington. Undeterred by a biting wind, large crowds assembled to line the route and an audience of nearly 8,000 people gathered in the building itself. A report in The Times marvelled at the ease and speed with which this glittering assembly took their seats in what was then one of the largest roofed interiors in Europe (Fig 8). Moments before the formal proceedings began, everyone present in this great amphitheatre, including 900 singers and 200 instrumentalists, stilled themselves to allow a photographer with a stereoscopic camera to record the scene.

As the Queen entered the hall, the audience rose to their feet. She wrote in her journal that the ‘intensely crowded’ space ‘made me feel quite giddy’. In a short speech of welcome by the Prince of Wales—rendered awkward by the echoing acoustics, a problem that dogged the interior until the installation of 135 suspended fibre-glass diffusers in 1969 (now reduced to 85)—the hall was described as having been built without government money and in fulfilment of the ‘long-cherished design’ of his late father, the Prince Consort, Albert (after whom, of course, it was named) ‘for the encouragement of the Arts and Sciences’.