“A stifling dark day. We take off from London at half past 10. It was raining a bit, cloudy and steamy, but when I got to Paddington the sky had cleared and it was quite beautiful,” 150 years ago, Britain’s Queen Victoria told her diary how she went to lay the foundation stone for a new hall in the middle of London. She was greeted by a crowd of 6,000 people or more, she wasn’t sure, at the spot where it had been decided to erect it. “They sang the National Anthem and the hardest moment for me, the one I dreaded, came – the reading of Bertie’s address and my response, both full of veiled allusions to my beloved. I was terribly disturbed and almost overwhelmed, but I managed to pull myself together.”
She calmed down during the ceremony and the Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but her emotional ordeal was not over. “What was most moving, and almost thrilling me again, was the trumpeting fanfare as the stone slowly slid into place.
I returned to my previous place. Under the direction of Costa, they played Alberto’s Invocazione all’Armonia too dear. Mario’s voice, once so admired by my beloved, sang his solo beautifully, even though he now has 61 of them! How I remembered how uncertain dear Albert was about the public performance of the piece I had helped him to write and I sang the solo for him.”
The marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom she affectionately called Bertie, was arranged but happy ever since their wedding on 10 February 1840. In a letter to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, the twenty-year-old Victoria, who had become Queen three years earlier, thanked him for “the promise of great happiness which you have helped to bring me by giving me dear Albert. He has all the qualities I could wish for to make me completely happy.”
Nine children were born to the couple, but they were not the only ones who made them happy. The Queen shared her husband’s passion for the world’s art, education and culture with her husband, who had no formal power or responsibilities. Prince Albert and Henry Cole came up with the idea for an international Great Exhibition. In 1851, at the Crystal Palace in nearby Hyde Park, they organised an exhibition of artworks of all kinds from all over the world. Within five months, some 6 million people had seen it, earning the Royal Commission £180,000, or more than $29 million today.
Enough money was raised to enable Prince Albert, as Chairman of the Commission, to buy land to the south of the Crystal Palace to build a hall where similar exhibitions and events could be held on a regular basis. But his vision did not stop there. He envisioned turning the area into one of the most successful cultural districts in the world. Entrance to museums and institutions would be free, he planned, and all people would have the opportunity to learn about history, culture, art, music and science.
In 1852, the Victoria and Albert Museum, as it is called today, dedicated to art and design, was indeed opened. Shortly afterwards, in 1857, the Science Museum opened its doors. Now all that remained to be built was the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, as it was called in the plans. Prince Albert had an exact idea of what it should look like, but things moved slowly. Too slowly for him to see his dream come true. On 14 December 1861, aged 42, he died suddenly. He was taken from Queen Victoria after 21 years of marriage by typhoid fever.
Death of a prince, birth of a hall
The Prince was gone, his vision lived on. The problem was that the money to make it happen was running out. The money raised by the Great Exhibition of 1851 had already been spent, and plans for a new exhibition in 1861 fell through, and with it a fresh influx of money. There was just enough money left to erect a memorial to Prince Albert in 1863, opposite where the Hall was to stand, but they had to start raising money for it from scratch.
Finally, in 1867, it was enough for the Queen to sign the establishment of the Royal Corporation to manage the Hall in April and, on 20 May, to lay the foundation stone with a golden mason’s trowel made just for the occasion. Before that, she had to say a few words. She spoke “indistinctly, slowly and under great emotional pressure”, according to reports at the time. She confided to her diary that she had been extremely distressed for five and a half years after her husband’s death, and her subjects suspected it too, as she hardly set foot among them during that time.
A capsule, probably containing gold and silver coins, was placed under the foundation stone. It was never dug up, so no one knows for sure, nor what the inscription says. What is known is that it was during the laying of the foundation stone that the Queen changed the name of the Hall from the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences to the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences. No one objected, and not just because she was Queen.
The designers of the Hall, Francis Fowke and Henry Y.D. Scott, liked ancient amphitheatres, although they also looked to Europe for the latest architectural fashions. They could not experiment too much. The hall had to be in harmony with the museums in the area, which, because of Albert’s vision, had already been named Albertopolis or Albert’s Town in 1850.
The choice of materials for the new hall had to take into account environmental compatibility, but also the quality of London’s air. It was extremely poor. Soot stuck to the facades so much that soon the decorations on the selected buildings were black. The Albert Hall was therefore decided to be built of red bricks. But which material should be used to make the decorative frieze or band that adorns the façade?
As all buildings in Albertopolis had to be reddish, so did the façade and frieze. Should they choose a stone of a suitable shade for the frieze? Carving would have been time-consuming, laborious and expensive, and in the end soot would have covered all the precious details. They had to find another solution. What about terracotta or clay?
At the beginning of the 19th century, it was more or less used as a substitute for stone, but in Albertopolis it took on a whole new meaning. Most architects agreed that it was cheap as a material and, as tiles could be made from it with moulds, it would be cheaper to make them. Moreover, terracotta was a material they knew how to use and is historically and artistically linked to the Italian Renaissance. It was thus symbolic of looking backwards, to the past, and looking forwards, representing the possibility of linking new times with old.
It was the ideal symbol of Prince Albert’s vision, but it did not convince everyone. Some architects disliked terracotta as a material, and were even more bothered by its supposedly ephemeral and fragile nature. The representatives of the factory where the panels were to be made described it as a mixture of pure baked clay with a low addition of raw clay. They assured them that the strength of the baked clay was not in the least questionable and that in the future terracotta would ‘make London’s architecture permanently beautiful and impressive’.
Although terracotta was also used in architecture in German countries, the designers of Albert Hall chose a rough version of it, not a smooth and delicate one. Some architects complained about this too, until they were convinced that the decision was well thought out. The rough surface reflects the spirit of the building and the honesty in the relationship between industry and design, and above all it is more appropriate for a building as massive as the one they are designing.
At the end of March 1867, work began on the construction of an elliptical hall with two axes, 83 and 72 metres long. At the top of the hall, they decided to erect a 41-metre-high dome. According to the plans, the hall would have had enough room for 8000 people, although 9000 could easily have been crammed in if necessary. At least then, no more today, because modern safety regulations stipulate that no more than 5,544 people should be allowed in the auditorium.
Electricity, a monstrous innovation
Before stepping inside, visitors naturally catch a glimpse of the frieze that winds its way down the roof. The decision to have Godfrey Sykes design it was also controversial, although Henry Cole, who wanted it, said he was an unsurpassed genius. Francis Fawke, Albert Hall’s first architect, also considered Sykes a master and inventor of English High Renaissance decoration, but some doubted him.
Originally from Yorshire, he started his career as an engraver and furthered his knowledge through work. He had no formal education, although he ended up teaching design part-time in his native Sheffield. Sykes, who was also an accomplished painter, did not see his ideas realised. He died of lung cancer in 1866, a year before the building was even begun.
In the same year, the architect Henry Scott requested that the mosaic frieze should be made of sculptures, but there was no money or time for them, so in the end terracotta panels were made from Godfrey Sykes’ ideas. The women of the mosaic workshop, held in what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, spent more than two years arranging them, so that the story of the triumph of art and science finally came to life on the façade, as it says on the dedication.
The Mosaic frieze is 244 metres long and covers an area of 483 square metres. It is inscribed with a dedication in 300 millimetre terracotta letters and brown and yellow characters outlined in black, symbolically representing 16 different themes: the countries of the world bringing their gifts to the Exhibition in 1851, music, sculpture, painting, princes, patrons of the arts and artists, stonemasons, foresters and brickmakers, architecture, the beginnings of art and science, agriculture, horticulture and the earth, astronomy and navigation, a group of philosophers, sages and students, engineering, machinery and pottery, and glassmaking.
A wrought-iron and glass dome rises above the frieze. The iron frame was first assembled in Manchester for testing before being placed on the building. The stability tests worked well, so the frame was dismantled again and transported to London by horse and cart. It was placed on the roof. Before the scaffolding was removed, the workers were evacuated, leaving only volunteers. Everyone looked on in horror at what was about to happen. Would the roof collapse? The iron frame was 338 tonnes and the glazing 279 tonnes. The dome did sink a little, but only by 0.8 millimetres. Then it settled on the retaining wall.
It stood firm until the two world wars, when its vulnerability became apparent. Glass does not get on well with bombs, and it is no match for secrecy. For example, German pilots used the roof of Albert Hall as a landmark because it reflected light so well, so in March 1940, when night blackout came, the British painted it black and applied anti-glare varnish over the paint.
But they were unable to protect it in October of that year, when three bombs exploded in its vicinity. They did not destroy the glass panels, but some of the glass was chipped off most of them.
The roof was also a problem in the First World War. When films were shown inside, it was covered with a giant black sheet to keep the light out. In 1917, an unexploded anti-aircraft mine hit the roof, completely destroying 8 panes of glass and damaging another 12 terracotta panels.
The roof, beautiful from the outside, became much less so when the visitor was seated inside. Already during the first concert, it turned out that the acoustics in the hall were very poor because of the roof. The reverberation even gave rise to the rumour that it was the only hall in which a British composer could be sure of hearing his composition twice.
The problem was partly solved by installing an awning under the dome. It made the sound a little better, but also protected the audience from the sun. In 1949, the awning was removed and replaced by aluminium panels. These were also helpful, but the acoustics were still not good. Just two years short of the centenary of the Hall’s grand opening on 29 March 1871, diffusion acoustic fibreglass panels were installed under the ceiling, finally taming the notorious reverberation.
In modern times, the organ designed by Henry Willis has also had to be restored. It took him 14 months to complete it on 29 March 1871, which is extremely short considering its size. It is the second largest organ in England, after the one in Liverpool Cathedral, which has 10,268 pipes.
The corporation that built the hall cost more than 1.1 million today and around 2.7 million today was invested in their restaurant between 2002 and 2004. With that money, they restored all the pipes and added a few more, so that today there are 9999. The largest flute, 13 metres high, weighs one tonne, and the smallest is no wider than a straw. If all the flutes were stacked side by side, they would stretch some 15 kilometres, but now, together with the other parts, they form an monument that is 21 metres high, 20 metres wide and weighs 150 tonnes.
During the restoration, a ceiling they didn’t even know existed was discovered inside the organ and removed. Long ago, the gas installation that originally lit the hall was removed. Although the system was a good one, with thousands of lamps lighting the hall in just 10 seconds, two years after the opening, electricity was installed in one part of the hall on a trial basis. Like all innovations, this one met with resistance. One donor complained that it was “a monstrous and unpleasant innovation”. Nevertheless, from 1888 the lighting was electric.
New times, new demands
But time has also come alive for the Hall as a whole. Between 1996 and 2004, it was renovated to meet modern requirements, at a cost of around $32 million. The work was divided into 30 smaller projects and carried out so discreetly that the programme was not disrupted at all.
For example, the ventilation of the auditorium had to be improved, more bars and restaurants had to be created, seats had to be replaced, the technical areas had to be modernised and the backstage areas had to be enlarged. The east and west entrances were glazed and new bars were added, and above all ramps were added to make the auditorium accessible to people with disabilities.
The most challenging was the construction of the new south entrance. They wanted to create a restaurant, a ticket shop and an underground access road. The old stairs were removed and an underground access was created, big enough for cars and three large trucks for the stage equipment. Once all this was done, the old stairs were reconstructed at the new entrance, in the same size and to the same extent as the old ones. The feat was so successful that they were awarded the Europa Nostra prize for outstanding achievement.
The corridors have also been refreshed. They got new carpets, which were woven especially for the Albert Hall. The pattern, renowned as the largest single woven pattern in the world, follows the elliptical curve of the building. In 1991, the Hall received another modernisation, this time somewhat surprising. The Albert Hall hosted the only official sumo tournament outside Japan. The biggest star, the Hawaiian wrestler Konishiki, was renowned as the heaviest sumo star in history at 238 kilograms. To get to the toilet at all, he had to be reinforced, and to shower, the showers in the dressing room had to be enlarged.
The Albert Hall was also a sports hall when needed. In 1909, it hosted the first indoor marathon, forcing the removal of all the seats. The winner was an Italian, the only participant to complete the required 524 laps.
Boxers such as Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno have also seen the inside of the Hall, while the famous Kray brothers have fought in the temple of art and science. In 1951, Ronnie fought Bobby Manito, his twin brother against Bill Sliney and the elder Charlie against Lew Lazar. He lost. Reggie won, but Ronnie was disqualified because he hit his opponent with his head instead of his song.
The Albert Hall hosted not only the silkworms, but also the beauties. From 1969 to 1988, it was the venue for the Miss World final, but it was the music that resonated loudest. In 1968, the BBC hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, after Sandie Shaw had won the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna the year before with Puppet on the string.
It became a hit, but never like the ABBA songs. When ABBA announced their 1977 Albert Hall show, more than 3.5 million people competed for the 5300 tickets. Yet, after the concert, the band members were not called on stage as many times as Cliff Richard. He reportedly had to reappear in front of the audience 200 times, but his fans still didn’t get enough.
The experience of attending a Michael Bolton concert was very special. They complained that a grey image was sitting in an empty seat. It seems that the ghost of Henry Willis, who built the organ, is living in the hall. When it was partly refurbished in the 1930s, workers reported a pale apparition ‘standing in front of the organ, staring at us’. Workers renovating the organ in the 1990s saw something similar.
The same spirit was also able to enter the audience. For example, in 1990, the auditorium staff received written complaints that a ghost had walked on stage in front of Jasper Carrott during his performance.
But at least it did no harm. In 1971, 23 rock concerts were allowed in the Albert Hall, and all but one ended in riots. So they were banned in 1972 and resented for ten years. In the case of animals, it lived even longer. They were not allowed on stage for 87 years after the Chelsea Arts Club brought an elephant on in 1926.
But no one complained when, towards the end of the First World War, representatives of the War Ministry climbed onto the roof and dropped leaflets from a height of 41 metres to check how to distribute propaganda material behind enemy lines. They also welcomed Albert Einstein on stage with great joy. In 1933, he fled Germany to escape the Nazis and a few months later, at a lecture in the Albert Hall, he asked the audience, “How can we save mankind and how can we save Europe from another catastrophe?”
At that time in England, they were still turning a blind eye to Nazism, but he opened one. Nevertheless, the war started and Hitler bombed London. He spared Albertopolis. Some because his pilots orientated themselves on the glass roof of Albert Hall, and some because he, too, had a vision of what he would do in the South Kensington district after the occupation of Britain, which to this day is the realisation of Prince Albert’s dream.
