Qualla: Queen Elizabeth Hall

Queen Elizabeth Hall: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Ahsmann, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1973, six years after the Queen Elizabeth Hall opened on London's South Bank, a few teenagers with skateboards noticed something. The undercroft beneath the foyer building - a sheltered concrete plaza laid out as a pedestrian walkway between the Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery - had banks and steps and ledges that seemed to have been designed for tricks. They were not. They were just the by-product of Hubert Bennett's brutalist architecture for the Greater London Council. But the skateboarders adopted the space, and over the next fifty years they made it London's most distinctive and defended street-skating spot.

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Image: Mark Ahsmann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Queen Elizabeth Hall: Britten Opens the Hall

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. The Queen Elizabeth Hall opened in March 1967 with a concert conducted by Benjamin Britten. It is the middle building of the South Bank Centre arts complex - smaller than the 1951 Royal Festival Hall next door, larger than the 360-seat Purcell Room it shares a structure with. Cap...

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain

Queen Elizabeth Hall: Concrete and Conviction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saval (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Queen Elizabeth Hall is brutalism in concentrated form. Octagonal reinforced-concrete columns support a foyer building shaped like a vee, linked to the auditorium by cast concrete tubes that look, depending on your mood, like spaceship docking ports or industrial ductwork. Th...

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Image: Saval (talk) (Uploads) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Queen Elizabeth Hall: An Acoustic of General Excellence

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the building does extraordinarily well is hold sound. In 1968, after a period of testing and adjustment by music critics and engineers, the hall's acoustics were judged of general excellence in the three key categories that matter: reverberation time, tone and definition, an...

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Image: User:Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Queen Elizabeth Hall: Long Live Southbank

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Southbank Centre proposed in the early 2010s to convert the skating undercroft into cafes and shops as part of a GBP 120 million Festival Wing development, the skaters fought back. The campaign called itself Long Live Southbank. It collected signatures, gathered media at...

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Image: Arild Vågen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Queen Elizabeth Hall: Let the Light In

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 2015 to 2018, the entire 1960s complex - Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, and Hayward Gallery - underwent complete internal refurbishment under the banner Let the Light In. The architecture practice Feilden Clegg Bradley led the work, the Arts Council put up GBP 10 millio...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0