The Royal Festival Hall has always been much more than a building. You have to
understand that in order to understand why it has taken so many decades to
refurbish the place.
It rose out of the ashes of war: a symbolically gleaming citadel of culture,
built (with whatever materials were to hand) by a country exhausted by
defending civilisation itself. With its big, democratic foyers, it was the
first concert-hall intended for the masses, not the monied. If the 1951
Festival of Britain was designed to boost the morale of a nation still beset
by rationing and bomb damage, the Festival Hall, at the heart of the site,
was a shining exemplar of the new philosophy that high art should be
accessible to all.
The building was infused with the same postwar idealism that led to the
founding of the Edinburgh Festival, the Third Programme and the Arts
Council. Indeed its very architectural style – curvy, airy and seemingly
lightweight despite its bulk – seemed to epitomise the optimism of the age:
the sense of a nation rejuvenated.
And, on a more practical level, it also filled a void in London’s musical
life. The much-loved Queen’s Hall had been bombed to bits. The Royal Albert
Hall was an acoustical nightmare. By the late 1940s, London had five
full-time symphony orchestras. They desperately needed somewhere to play. As
the foundation stone for the Festival Hall was laid, in October 1949, The
Times expressed the hope that it would “take its place among the great
European halls: the Concertgebouw, the Gewandhaus, the Musikverein”.
Alas, that was never to be. Performers quickly realised that the Festival Hall
had serious defects. It was too big, and its internal walls absorbed the
sound, rather than reflecting it. Punters sitting under the overhangs
complained that they were listening to music “through the wrong end of a
telescope”. Musicians couldn’t even hear their colleagues on the other side
of the platform. It was a sonic diaster – and not much improved by the
management’s sticking-plaster remedy: electronic artificial reverberation.
The acoustics weren’t the only problem. The grand entrances and spacious
foyers were gradually closed off, cluttered up, “remodelled” and
“modernised” – to such an extent that the sweepingly elegant 1951 lines were
barely detectable. Then the hall was given a Brutalist concrete apron of
dingy walkways and “satellite” buildings – the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the
Purcell Room, the Hayward Gallery – that horrified the public. And when Ken
Livingstone’s Greater London Council took control, the whole South Bank site
became a political football: a kind of anti-Thatcher fortress, scowling at
Westminster from the opposite bank of the Thames.
Matters didn’t improve when the GLC was abolished and the Festival Hall was
handed over to a new South Bank Board. Everyone knew that “something had to
be done” – not least because concertgoers were by this time terrified of
venturing into an area that had become one of the dingiest and creepiest in
London. But what?
Grandiose masterplans, conceived by the greatest architectural minds of the
age – Terry Farrell, Richard Rogers, Rick Mather – rose and fell like pods
on the London Eye. One involved constructing an enormous roof over the site.
Another would have lumbered the Festival Hall with a praetorian guard of
office blocks. The projected costs were astonomical. The South Bank Board,
Arts Council, Government and, inevitably, Ken Livingstone all meddled,
squabbled and procrastinated. Meanwhile, the Festival Hall literally fell
apart. Attending a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in 2001, I found
myself sitting in a £60 stalls seat held together by parcel-tape.
The turning-point came in 2002. A beefed-up South Bank Board, headed by Lord
Hollick, started to do serious fundraising. “Our main task was persuading
donors that, after 20 years of plans, this time it was for real,” Hollick
says. Michael Lynch, a canny Australian who had previously run the Sydney
Opera House, was brought in as chief executive. And a vital strategic
decision was taken. “Rather than trying to do a ‘grand project’, we decided
to go step by step,” Hollick says. “We broke the task into manageable bits,
and gained institutional expertise as we went.”
So, little by little, the transformation began. The concrete aprons
disappeared. Chic new shops and restaurants appeared. A slim “liner”
building, housing the Centre’s administrative staff, was erected alongside a
nearby railway bridge, liberating acres of space inside the hall. Finally,
two years ago, the hall itself disappeared under wraps and scaffolding for
its gargantuan makeover.
It wasn’t plain sailing. Far more asbestos than had been anticipated was
discovered. That added weeks of extra work. And the sheer size of the
building posed daunting problems. “About 30 per cent of our task involved
replacing the 1951 engineering and mechanical services,” Lynch says. “Not
sexy, not visible, not very interesting. But absolutely essential to giving
the hall another 30 years of life.”
In the auditorium the platform was reconfigured and the walls resurfaced in a
now-or-never attempt to give some elusive “bloom” to the acoustics, and
2,700 new seats were installed to cater for 21st-century posteriors. We are
all much plumper than our forebears in the “austerity” 1940s.
Punters streaming into the hall this weekend will certainly notice all that.
But they may be dazzled even more by the enlarged, daylight-flooded foyers.
“We’ve given the public 35 per cent more space,” Lynch says proudly.
The final price-tag? Around £115 million (including £22 million from the
Heritage Lottery Fund), Hollick reckons – of which £95 million will have
been spent on the Festival Hall and the remainder on work elsewhere. And
although around £6 million still has to be raised, the division between
public and private funding will be a very Blairite 50/50.
Nobody yet knows how the hall will “play”. But what has been apparent for
months is that the entire ambience of the South Bank has been transformed.
From being what a Commons Select Committee described as a “squalid, seedy
and menacing environment” just five years ago, it is now one of London’s
prime leisure playgrounds – thanks to the decision to get the shops and
caffs up and running before the hall was ready.
That makes astute business sense. “We already have around £7.5 million of
income from commercial activities to feed into our artistic work,” Hollick
says. “I could see that rising to £10 million in three years.”
Next, he wants to establish “South-bank Television” to disseminate the
Festival Hall’s performances round the world. After that, the Hayward
Gallery is to be overhauled, and an open-air auditorium built on Jubilee
Gardens. An “iconic new building” is also planned for the British Film
Institute. The Festival Hall may be gloriously revived, but elsewhere the
work goes on.
