Royal Albert Hall

Stand on the steps and look up. The walls are warm red brick, laid in long, even courses, and trimmed with pale terracotta the colour of biscuit. Traffic hums along Kensington Gore behind you. Across the road, the trees of Kensington Gardens move in the wind. In front of you rises a building shaped like nothing else in London... a great oval drum, crowned by a shallow dome of glass and iron.

This is the Royal Albert Hall. It looks like a Roman amphitheatre that someone decided to put a lid on. That comparison is not an accident. The Victorians who planned it looked back to the open-air arenas of the ancient world, where crowds gathered in a ring to watch and listen. Here, they built that ring in brick, and closed it against the London rain.

The story begins with a man who never saw it. Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, was the driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851. That was a vast show of industry and design, held in a glass building called the Crystal Palace in nearby Hyde Park. It made a profit. Albert wanted that money spent on education, on places where the arts and sciences could be shared with ordinary people.

Land was bought here, south of the park, for that purpose. Over the following decades, museums, colleges and learned societies grew up around it. Londoners gave the district a playful nickname, Albertopolis, after the prince whose idea it was. Many of those institutions are still your neighbours today. Within a short walk you will find some of the great museums of the city, all part of the same Victorian dream.

Albert died in 1861, before a central hall could be built. His widow carried the project forward in his memory. The design came mainly from Captain Francis Fowke, an army engineer, and was completed after his death by another engineer, Henry Young Darracott Scott. So this is not the work of a fashionable architect. It is the work of military engineers, and you can feel that in its practical, sturdy confidence.

Here is the first surprise. Money was tight, so the builders tried an unusual idea. They sold seats in advance, on very long leases that run for 999 years. The people who bought them gained the right to attend events in their own seats. Some of those seats are still privately held today, passed down through families and companies. In a sense, part of the audience owns a small piece of the building.

The Hall opened in 1871. Queen Victoria came for the ceremony. According to the well-known account, she was so moved that she could not deliver her speech, and her son, the Prince of Wales, declared the Hall open instead. Before you go inside, walk slowly around the outside. Look high up, below the roofline, and you will see a long decorated band that circles the entire building.

That band is a mosaic frieze. It shows a procession of figures representing the arts and sciences, and the nations taking part in them. Above it, large terracotta letters run around the drum, carrying an inscription about the building and its purpose. Most visitors never read it, because you must walk the full circle to finish the sentence. It is worth the walk. The curve slowly turns the street around you as you go.

Now for the second surprise, which is about sound. For its first century, the Hall had a famous problem: an echo. Sound bounced off the great dome and came back to the audience a moment later. Musicians joked that a composer could hear a new piece performed twice in one evening. Engineers tried many fixes over the years, with limited success, while the building stayed busy with concerts all the same.

The real answer came in the late 1960s. Large fibreglass discs were hung from the ceiling, high above the arena. People call them the mushrooms, because that is exactly what they look like from below. They break up the sound before it can bounce back. If you go inside for a concert or a tour, look straight up. Those odd shapes are one of the most effective acoustic repairs of the twentieth century.

On the stage end of the auditorium, you may see the great organ. When it was installed, it was among the largest in the world, and its sound can fill the vast space without any amplification. Its pipes rise in rows across the wall. Even when it is silent, it gives the room a sense of scale. Organists from around the world come to play it, and its lowest notes are felt as much as heard.

This Hall has heard almost everything. Classical symphonies, boxing matches, rock concerts, tennis, ballet, political rallies and film premieres have all filled the arena. Its most famous tradition is the Proms, a long summer season of concerts. The Proms moved here in 1941, after their old home, the Queen's Hall, was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. Each summer, people queue for standing places on the arena floor, close enough to watch the players' faces.

Before you leave, cross the road carefully and turn around. From the edge of Kensington Gardens, you can see the Hall and, behind you, the gilded Albert Memorial, where the prince sits under a tall decorated canopy. The two face each other, as if in conversation. The Queen's memorial to her husband looks across at the Hall that carries his name. Take a moment there, in the space between them, and listen to the city carrying on around you.