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Location: Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX, United Kingdom .
Phone: +44 844 875 0073
Royal Festival Hall:
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,500-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge. It is a Grade I listed building, the first post-war building to become so protected (in 1981).[1] The London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are resident in the hall.
The hall was built as part of the Festival of Britain for London County Council, and was officially opened on 3 May 1951. When the LCC's successor, the Greater London Council, was abolished in 1986, the Festival Hall was taken over by the Arts Council, and managed together with the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room (opened 1967) and the Hayward Gallery (1968), eventually becoming an independent arts organisation, now known as the Southbank Centre, in April 1988.
History of Royal Festival Hall:
The Festival Hall project was led by London County Council’s chief architect, Robert Matthew, who gathered around him a young team of talented designers including Leslie Martin, who was eventually to lead the project with Edwin Williams and Peter Moro, along with the furniture designer Robin Day and his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day. The acoustical consultant was Hope Bagenal, working with members of the Building Research Station; Henry Humphreys, Peter Parkin and William Allen.[5] Martin was 39 at the time, and very taken with the Nordic activities of Alvar Aalto and Gunnar Asplund.
The figure who really drove the project forward was Herbert Morrison, the Labour Party politician. He it was who had insisted that Matthew had Martin as his deputy architect, treating the Festival Hall as a special project.
A 1948 sketch by Martin shows the design of the concert hall as the egg in a box. But the strength of the design was the arrangement of interior space: the central staircase has a ceremonial feel and moves elegantly through the different levels of light and air.
They were concerned that whilst the scale of the project demanded a monumental building, it should not ape the triumphal classicism of many earlier public buildings. The wide open foyers, with bars and restaurants, were intended to be meeting places for all: there were to be no separate bars for different classes of patron. Because these public spaces were built around the auditorium, they also had the effect of insulating the Hall from the noise of the adjacent railway bridge.
