Qualla: Royal Festival Hall

Royal Festival Hall: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Pead, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. The boilers were Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Two of them, the same engines that powered Spitfires through the Battle of Britain, adapted to run on town gas, driving compressors that pulled Thames water through a centrifugal pump beneath Hungerford Bridge and ran it through a heat pump for both heating and cooling. It worked beautifully. It was also enormously oversized, and after the 1951 Festival of Britain closed, the whole system was sold off. The Royal Festival Hall opened on 3 May 1951 with a gala concert before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent and Sir Adrian Boult. The journalist Bernard Levin walked inside and said he was overwhelmed by a shock of breathless delight at the originality and beauty of the interior. He felt instantly transported far into the future, as if he were on another planet. That was the building working at its absolute best.

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Image: Michael Pead | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Royal Festival Hall: Egg in a Box

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simdaperce, CC BY-SA 3.0. The London County Council's chief architect Robert Matthew assembled the team. Leslie Martin, thirty-nine years old and deeply influenced by the Nordic modernism of Alvar Aalto and Gunnar Asplund, led the design with Edwin Williams and Peter Moro. The furniture designer Robin Day...

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Image: Simdaperce | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Festival Hall: Science and Sound

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Knight from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Royal Festival Hall was one of the first concert halls in the world built using genuine acoustical science, both theoretical and experimental. Hope Bagenal, working with Henry Humphreys, Peter Parkin, and William Allen at the Building Research Station, sat at the design table...

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Image: Garry Knight from London, England | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Festival Hall: The Greeks and the Loudspeakers

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1962, after a decade of experiments, the authorities had become convinced that no surface treatment could improve the reverberation. Lengthening the reverberation would require modifying the structure itself, losing seats, building a new ceiling. So Building Research Station e...

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Image: Ben Brooksbank | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Festival Hall: Tearing It Open

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 2005 and 2007, architect Diane Haigh of Allies and Morrison led a substantial renovation, with acoustic advice from Kirkegaard Associates and structural engineering from Price & Myers. The Twentieth Century Society fought it. The interior of the concert hall, almost entir...

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Image: Acabashi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Royal Festival Hall: Listed and Listening

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. In 1981 the Royal Festival Hall became the first post-war building in Britain to be Grade I listed, the highest protection English heritage law offers. Six resident orchestras now make their home here: the London Philharmonic, the Philharmonia, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlight...

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain